Imagine being recognised as a refugee, granted protection, and then left to sleep on the street with your children. No housing, no support, no medical care, and no way to enroll your children in school. This is not the country you fled. It is the country that was supposed to keep you safe.
For a growing number of families, that country is Greece. And Switzerland has become one of the few states in Europe determined to send them back there.
In our anniversary newsletter this spring, we wrote briefly about the situation in Greece. Since then, the picture has deteriorated and grown more troubling. Over the next three weeks, we will discuss the deportation practices currently employed by Switzerland, which are often overlooked despite their strictness.
This is the first of three newsletters on how protection is narrowing in Switzerland – not through new legislation, but through how existing law is interpreted and applied. This first part examines Greece; the following two will turn to Afghanistan and Turkey.
Why this matters
To understand why this matters, it helps to know how we got here.
For more than a decade, transfers of asylum seekers to Greece under the Dublin system were largely suspended. Following judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU in 2011, EU countries generally stopped transferring people to Greece when Greece was responsible for examining their asylum application, because of systemic deficiencies in its asylum system and the risk of inhuman or degrading treatment. This did not apply to people who had already been granted protection in Greece, who continued to be returned there throughout this period.
This changed in April 2025, when several European countries began treating Dublin transfers to Greece differently, following the European Commission’s assessment that Greece’s asylum system on the mainland no longer showed the deficiencies that had previously prevented such transfers. On paper, the situation had improved. On the ground, serious concerns remain. We are particularly concerned that we have already seen isolated cases of non admission decisions, raising serious questions about the protection available to people affected by these decisions.
💡 Two different types of returns
- Dublin transfers concern people whose asylum application is the responsibility of another European country. In these cases, a person may be transferred to Greece because Greece is responsible for examining their asylum claim. For example, because they first applied for asylum or entered the EU there.
- Returns to a safe third country, on the other hand, concern people who have already been granted refugee or other international protection in Greece. They are not being returned to Greece to have their asylum claim examined; they are being returned to the country where they already hold protection status.
What actually awaits a family sent back to Greece?
Being granted protection in Greece does not mean being given a place in it. Thirty days after receiving status, a refugee must vacate reception accommodation, without being offered stable transitional housing. There is no reliably accessible social-welfare safety net on which many newly recognised refugees can depend; rents in Athens and Thessaloniki are often unaffordable for people without stable income and are subject to significant administrative barriers, while homeless shelters are limited and may be difficult for recognised refugees to access. In January 2026, Greece’s own Minister of Migration stated that housing programmes for refugees «do not make sense» and announced that the money would be redirected to employment and training instead.
What this looks like in real life is a series of locked doors, each one bolted to the next. Access to public healthcare is closely tied to possession of an active social security number (AMKA) or another recognised registration document. In practice, many refugees have faced difficulties activating or maintaining an AMKA, particularly where this depends on employment, documentation, or an address. The barriers reinforce one another. Without work there is no healthcare, without an address there is no work, without documents there is neither. The problem is severe enough that in November 2025 the European Commission referred Greece to the Court of Justice of the EU over discriminatory rules on family benefits and social assistance that exclude third-country nationals, including recognised refugees, from basic social protections. Greece has maintained these rules in place. The result is significant hardship for many, particularly those returned from abroad. A study by the Immigration Policy Lab at ETH Zurich, UCL, and UNHCR found that among homeless people with a refugee background in Greece, 44% were recognised refugees (the remainder being asylum seekers), while the overall homelessness rate among refugees and asylum seekers was estimated at 1–3%.
For people returned from abroad, the fall is immediate. Refugee Support Aegean and PRO ASYL documented at least fifty such cases since the start of 2025, including single parents with children, LGBTQI+ people, and people with serious illnesses, and in the overwhelming majority the person ended up on the street, in a public square, or in precarious informal housing. One woman returned to Greece took the bus from the airport into central Athens and spent her first night sleeping in a city square. None of those who returned received documents, information, or support on arrival.
And Switzerland is one of the main forces behind these returns. In 2025 alone, it filed 2,513 requests to send recognised refugees back to Greece, constituting nearly half of the European total in the dataset cited by Refugee Support Aegean, and second only to Germany. The number of people returned to Greece nearly doubled in a single year, from 390 in 2024 to 725 in 2025. These are deliberate returns to a system that has granted protection to over 167,000 people between 2020 and 2025, without a system to receive them.
What also worries us
Both the European Court and a UN body have now raised serious legal concerns about detention in the «safe areas». Switzerland still funds them, and keeps returning families to a system whose worst edges it helped construct.
Families are no longer being spared. In a reference judgment from September 2025, the Federal Administrative Court (FAC) tightened its case law. Until then, following a ruling from March 2022, families with children had generally been exempt from removal to Greece, unless the circumstances were exceptionally favourable. Now, the court considers that the removal of a family is reasonable only if the persons concerned have unsuccessfully undertaken all efforts within their means to establish a dignified life in Greece. In one case, the court openly acknowledged that access to adequate housing remained a central issue for families with children, and that this particular family was at high risk of becoming homeless upon their return. Nevertheless, it ordered that the removal proceed. It even suggested that families could turn to aid organisations to find accommodation and employment, a suggestion that fourteen Greek NGOs specialising in asylum formally rejected in a letter from July 2025, warning the Court that they were already stretched to the limit and could not act as a substitute for the State. The Swiss Refugee Council has strongly criticised this decision and is calling for families and vulnerable individuals to be completely exempted from it.
This puts Switzerland at the far edge of European practice. Most of Europe still does not return recognised-refugee families to Greece. Where courts elsewhere have opened the door, they have largely done so for single, healthy, employable adults. Germany’s Federal Administrative Court, for instance, cleared returns only for non-vulnerable single men and still has proceedings pending on women and families. Switzerland is among the very few states not only permitting these removals but systematically confirming and carrying out the removal of families.
And Switzerland helped build the conditions people are sent back to. Switzerland co-finances the operation of the «safe areas» and reception centres on Samos and other Greek islands, committing 40 million francs for 2022–2026. In autumn 2025, it decided to extend its contributions to Greece under EU contracts until 2029, with a corresponding agreement providing for payments of just under 30 million Swiss francs. On Samos, Republik and the WAV research collective documented hundreds of unaccompanied minors being held in prison-like conditions with illness, violence, poor food, and little access to medical, legal, or psychosocial care. The European Court of Human Rights intervened repeatedly: in February 2025 it granted interim measures for four detained children, in April for a fifth, and in May for a further 45, held on average 142 days, finally forcing the facility’s evacuation.
In a separate case brought by AsyLex and our partner the Human Rights Legal Project, concerning five other children held for between 80 and 161 days, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention reached the same conclusion.
Both the European Court and a UN body have now raised serious legal concerns about detention in the «safe areas». Switzerland still funds them, and keeps returning families to a system whose worst edges it helped construct.
In its decisions, the Swiss State Secretariat for Migration (SEM) frequently points to a range of NGOs in Greece as potential sources of support for people facing such circumstances. We contacted 50 of the organisations referred to by the SEM and received no response from 44 of them. This raises an important question as to whether the mere existence of such organisations can reasonably be taken as evidence that effective and accessible support is actually available to people upon return.
What gives us hope
Swiss courts have repeatedly cleared these removals. But that is not the end of the road, and it is where our work matters most.
One case in particular has stayed with us.
A young Afghan couple had already found safety once, having been recognised as refugees in Greece, only to be left without housing, income or access to healthcare weeks after receiving protection. In Switzerland, the courts ordered their return despite the mother’s severe psychiatric condition and even though other members of the same family had been granted protection in Switzerland on the same facts. Six days after the removal was confirmed, their daughter was born. The authorities responded by adding her to the family’s readmission request to Greece. With all domestic remedies exhausted, AsyLex brought the case to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which granted interim measures requesting that the removal be suspended. The family remains together and safe, and we continue to represent them.
Together with human-rights lawyer Stephanie Motz, AsyLex has taken cases to the United Nations treaty bodies in Geneva after the Federal Administrative Court upheld a deportation. In one case, a torture survivor recognised as a refugee in Greece had been left to live on the street there with no access to medical care, yet the Swiss authorities and the court held that Greece could be presumed a safe third country. The UN Committee Against Torture intervened by granting interim measures and requesting that his removal be suspended. In a parallel case, the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women did the same. Of the three linked proceedings, AsyLex litigated and won two alongside Stephanie Motz.
These interventions confirm something we hold onto: when a Swiss court closes the door, an international one can still open it, but only if someone files the case, in time, with the evidence assembled properly. That is the work our teams do, and it is why your support matters.
Thank you for reading to the end. Greece is only the first part of this story; over the next two weeks we’ll look at how the same narrowing of protection is playing out in returns to Afghanistan and Turkey. Follow along, share this with anyone who should see it, and, if you’re able, support the legal work that keeps these cases from ending in silence.