Country briefing: Statelessness and refugees in Greece • Concerning the Appeals Committees, in recent years the second instance recognition rate has decreased significantly raising concerns about the operation of an efficient and fair asylum procedure in Greece.8 • Delays in the procedure have been reported when statelessness is disclosed to allow for gathering of information due to decision-makers lacking relevant knowledge/expertise. • There is a lack of access to legal advisors specialised in statelessness generally in some areas (e.g. Lesvos), and a lack of information available to applicants on nationality rights and statelessness specifically. Interpreters and ‘cultural mediators’ are reportedly influencing official decisions on nationality status in some cases inappropriately or without the necessary training or expertise. • Immigration detention • If statelessness is not adequately addressed in the procedure it can lead to prolonged - and risk of arbitrary or unlawful - detention. • There is still no dedicated Statelessness Determination Procedure in Greece so it’s not clear what the legal routes to protection are under the 1954 Convention if a stateless person is refused refugee protection. Due to the lack of an individual assessment procedure prior to the imposition of a detention order and lack of effective, periodic detention reviews, individuals can be subject to return procedures and prolonged detention even if their nationality is unknown and without proper determination of nationality status. • Child’s right to a nationality • The lack of awareness of the implications of statelessness and gender discrimination in nationality laws leads to inconsistent implementation of the safeguard in Greek law to grant nationality to otherwise stateless children born in the country. • Children’s nationality is routinely registered as the same as their parents on their asylum ID without examining whether a parent can confer a nationality to the child. Naturalisation • Since there is no dedicated Statelessness Determination Procedure in Greece the identification of statelessness is at the full discretion of the Ministry of Interior. • The naturalisation procedure for stateless people in Greece cannot be adequately implemented, as stateless people face many obstacles to regularising their residence status in Greece, which is a necessary condition for access to naturalisation. 8 Asylum Information Database, Country Report: Greece (2018), pp. 16 3