Protection of stateless persons in Greece

This post forms part of our series in showcasing abstracts of presentations featured at the 2019 Migration, Refugees and Statelessness conference, hosted in November 2019 at The University of Melbourne.

Konstantina Keramitsi

In Greece, there are still stateless persons who face a number of problems due to the lack of nationality and the absence of legal protection. Greece enacted the Statelessness Convention by ratification by Law 139/1975. Since then, there has been no other legislation in the Greek law that refers solely to stateless persons, but only provisions on citizenship or immigration laws that define stateless persons as those who meet the conditions set out in Article 1 of the Statelessness Convention. Moreover, this law does not include a special procedure for recognizing stateless people. It had only transposed the Convention without adding more explanations. Because of the above mentioned “legal limbo” status, these individuals often live in conditions of protracted marginalization and discrimination, facing numerous difficulties, such as the inability to receive medical assistance, travel, enroll in educational programs, acquire property, obtain legal employment, marry or open a bank account and arbitrarily detention. Some of them had seek justice to the Courts either national or international. This paper presents an overview of the statelessness phenomenon in Greece and whether these people are protected in Greece by specific legislation.

Κonstantina Keramitsi is PhD Student in University of Macedonia in Greece and her research interests are stateless persons and human rights. She has successfully completed a Master in Economics and Politics Studies in South and South-eastern Europe and her Masters thesis was about the reasons for immigration from South Asia.