ROZITA has spent one-third of her life in prison. She’s three years old.
Her parents, undocumented migrants from Afghanistan, were arrested in Greece and sentenced for forgery and immigration violations. They had illegally entered the country last year and were caught trying to leave on forged passports.
A court in Kilkis, a town in central Macedonia, sentenced the couple to six months in prison and fined them 3,000 euros. The sentence was indefinitely suspended on the grounds they would be deported.
This was in December 2008. They are still awaiting deportation.
They are still behind bars. To be deported, they need passports, which they do not have. This is why Rozita and her mother, Zahra, remain locked up.
Rozita is with her mother in a women’s prison in Thiva, about 50km outside Athens. The father is being held in a separate facility. Over the past 10 months, mother and daughter have been shuttled around the country: from a jail in Kilkis to a detention facility in Thessaloniki and the Korydalos prison in Athens.
Technorati Tags: greece, asylum, immigration, children
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Absolutely disgusting. I hope those silly greeks who talk malakies about how “Greeks care about children” read this. It is a clear case of a need for humanitarian permits to protect the child, since they cannot deport the family.
Just sickening.
More positively, the National Council for Human Rights has taken its first case of legal activism. it’s in Greek, only: http://news.kathimerini.gr/4dc.....009_331928
It concerns a 19yr old, second generation (born in Greece) and it seems that the NCHR is pushing for a change to the Citizenship Code. The article also mentions the strong jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights — as I keep saying in this blog. Greece has to accept European concepts of human rights.
An interesting case, from the UK, about an asylum-seeker who made false claims and then went through many appeals, costing the state rather a lot of money… http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t.....865437.ece
Ah… UK’s a nightmare for asylum seekers; I almost got myself killed there when I was one.