AsyLex is proud to announce a significant success in halting the removal to Greece of a newborn baby girl and her parents: the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) has registered our complaint and granted interim measures suspending the removal, pending its review of the case.
Background: a family failed by the the «Safe Third Country» presumption
Our clients, a young Afghan couple, were recognised as refugees in Greece. Like so many persons who have received international protection there, they had to vacate their reception centre within 30 days of recognition, with the small financial allowance they’d received ceasing immediately, even before the decision was formally notified to them, leaving them with no housing, no income, and no way to access the labour market. For several weeks, they lived in an abandoned building without water, electricity, or sanitation. Unable to secure stable housing, employment, or healthcare, they fled to Switzerland together with extended family members, including the mother’s own mother, who was in poor physical and psychological health and dependent on their care.
This is standard practice, not an isolated failure. The Greek ESTIA and HELIOS programmes, which once provided housing and integration support to recognised refugees, were terminated in 2022 and 2024 respectively. Their successor, HELIOS+, does not provide accommodation at all (only rental subsidies to those who have already independently signed a lease) and reached just 934 people by December 2025, against 134,576 active protection residence permits in the country.
Rather than treating this as a family in acute need of protection, the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) and, on appeal, the Federal Administrative Court (FAC) processed their case through the well-worn track reserved for persons with protection elsewhere in Europe: Greece was deemed a «safe third country,» and the family’s return was ordered, even after the mother’s psychiatric condition was flagged to the cantonal authorities, and even after other family members were granted temporary admission to Switzerland on the very same facts.
In Switzerland, the couple’s daughter was born on 21 October 2025 – just six days after the Federal Administrative Court (FAC) had dismissed their appeal and confirmed the removal order.
đź’ˇSafe third country
A legal presumption that a person can be returned to another country deemed safe for them — often one that already granted them protection — without re-examining their claim. Critics argue it is applied formally, without verifying whether that country is genuinely safe for the specific individual.
When the couple asked the SEM to reconsider in light of their daughter’s birth – arguing that Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and Article 3 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) required a fresh, individualised assessment of what removal would actually mean for an infant – the SEM’s response was to arrange for Greece to add the baby to her parents‘ readmission request, and then reject the reconsideration outright. The birth was acknowledged as a «new fact,» but the SEM held it changed nothing: Greece remained «safe,» the family had supposedly not shown a concrete risk of destitution – in effect, finding that they had not exhausted the assistance purportedly available to them in Greece, or tried hard enough to remedy their own situation there – and that the case law on adult persons with international protection applied just the same to a newborn, as she would be with her parents.
The family appealed once more, invoking Tarakhel v. Switzerland, in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that transferring vulnerable individuals – particularly children – without an individualised assessment and concrete guarantees can itself breach Article 3 ECHR. The FAC never reached the merits: because the parents, both recognised refugees with no income and no access to the labour market, could not pay the court’s advance-on-costs, their appeal was declared inadmissible in April 2026.
At no point in this process did any Swiss authority examine what removal would concretely mean for this particular baby – where she would sleep, how she would be fed, who would treat her if she fell ill, or what would happen to her if her mother’s mental health, already fragile, collapsed under the weight of homelessness and destitution in Greece.
Article 8 ECHR: Protects the right to family and private life; the state cannot interfere unless it is lawful and necessary, so removals that break up a family must be individually justified.
Article 3 CRC: Requires that a child’s best interests be a primary consideration in every decision affecting them.
Why This Case Matters
The mother’s psychiatric history is severe: a recurrent depressive disorder with psychotic features, postpartum depression, an anxiety disorder coupled with suicidal ideation, auditory hallucinations, and a clinically assessed high suicide risk. Her psychiatrist certified that continued specialised treatment in Switzerland is indispensable and that removal is medically contraindicated. Greece offers no specialised psychiatric care for beneficiaries of protection,
A newborn depends entirely on her caregiver. If her mother decompensates – in a country where the family has already experienced homelessness, and where accessing basic healthcare requires a social security number (AMKA) that in turn requires formal employment neither parent can obtain – the infant’s safety, health, and development are placed directly at risk: An active AMKA must be entered into Greece’s national health database before any prescription or medical examination can be issued free of charge. So, a parent’s inability to activate her own AMKA extends the very same barrier to her child. The Complainant’s own access to healthcare in Greece would be blocked for exactly the same structural reason as her mother’s psychiatric care.
The Committee on the Rights of the Child Intervenes
Having exhausted all domestic remedies in Switzerland, AsyLex brought the case before the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Committee has now registered the complaint and granted interim measures, suspending the family’s removal to Greece while it examines the case on the merits.
This is an important development. It signals that an international human rights body recognises, at least provisionally, that the question of whether Greece’s reception conditions are compatible with a newborn’s rights under the CRC cannot be waved away by reference to Greece’s general status as a «safe» country. It demands the individualised, concrete examination that Swiss authorities failed to conduct at every stage of this case. Removal to Greece on the strength of its formal status as a “safe third country” is a constellation AsyLex sees very often: people who were granted protection there, then found themselves destitute and unsupported, and who are sent back by other European states without any genuine inquiry into what awaits them.
Greece received 9,179 readmission requests for recognised refugees from other European states in 2025 alone, more than triple the number recorded in 2024, and 725 people, including families with children, were actually returned that year.[1] Courts elsewhere have already reached the opposite conclusion to the FAC’s: Germany’s Higher Administrative Court (OVG LĂĽneburg) held in 2021 that removing recognised refugees to Greece exposed them to a real risk of treatment contrary to Article 3 ECHR, citing the near-total absence of social support there.[2]
For AsyLex, this case is part of a broader effort to show that the systemic collapse of reception and integration conditions for recognised refugees in Greece. The cessation and closure of organisations providing support services in recent years, the evaporation of housing support, and the circular impossibility of accessing healthcare without employment is not a series of isolated hardships, but a pattern that renders return untenable, especially for the most vulnerable: newborns, children, and those in psychiatric crisis.
The registration of the case and the granting of interim measures mean that this family can stay in Switzerland in relative security during the period of the now-initiated CRC proceedings, during which we will continue to represent the family.
Sources
- Article 109(1), Greek Asylum Code
- Law 4939/2022 (National Legislation 5019/2023, replacing Law 4636/2019)
- RSA & PRO ASYL, Systemic Deficiencies in the Access of Beneficiaries of International Protection to Documents and Socio-Economic Rights, 30 March 2023
- RSA & PRO ASYL, Recognised Refugees 2026, April 2026, pp. 46–47
- IOM, HELIOS+ Factsheet, 31 December 2025
- Greek Ombudsman, decision 385955/13692/2026, 20 February 2026
- Germany, Higher Administrative Court of Lower Saxony (OVG LĂĽneburg), judgment of 19 April 2021, 10 LB 244/20.