Reporting by Nektaria Psaraki

‘Not for €250, not for €250 million.’

That was the unequivocal response from lawyers with Alternative Intervention, a grouping within the Athens Bar Association (DSA), to a new scheme introduced by Migration and Asylum Minister Thanos Plevris that offers lawyers an additional €250 when an asylum seeker they have advised ultimately agrees to leave Greece.

Under a Joint Ministerial Decision issued on 30 June, newly arrived refugees and migrants are to be offered ‘free legal guidance’ following the initial screening procedure.

Lawyers participating in the scheme receive €160 for each group video session, regardless of whether 15 or 50 asylum seekers attend. If, following that guidance, an asylum seeker opts for voluntary return and subsequently leaves the country, the lawyer receives a further €250.

Alternative Intervention lawyers are calling for the decision to be withdrawn in its entirety. They argue that linking a lawyer’s remuneration to the applicant’s decision to return creates a direct conflict of interest and fundamentally distorts the lawyer’s institutional role.

Their criticism, however, goes well beyond the financial incentive.

Under the scheme, lawyers are required to advise asylum seekers about the asylum process while also explaining the severe criminal penalties introduced for unlawful entry and residence and informing them about voluntary return programmes. The decision also introduces categories such as people with a ‘strong refugee profile’, based largely on nationality, despite the requirement under international refugee law for asylum claims to be assessed individually.

For the lawyers opposing the measure, the result is a system in which legal professionals risk being transformed from guarantors of rights into agents implementing what Plevris himself has repeatedly described as a policy of ‘return or prison’.

They are also sharply critical of the leadership of the Athens Bar Association. According to Alternative Intervention, the association’s president reached an informal agreeement with Plevris shortly before a meeting on the issue. While the bar association has objected to the €250 incentive, its critics say it has effectively accepted the broader role assigned to lawyers under the scheme.

They describe that role as ‘an insult to the dignity of the legal profession and ethically unacceptable’.

Group legal advice and the loss of individual assessment

At an event organised by Alternative Intervention at the Athens Bar Association on Thursday under the title ‘Lawyer or return administrator?’, lawyer Christina Svana outlined how the system is intended to operate.

The Joint Ministerial Decision provides for ‘free legal guidance to asylum seekers after the screening process, as provided for in the new regulation on migration and asylum’, she said.

An asylum seeker must first request legal guidance, while the decision itself establishes conditions governing eligibility which, according to Svana, ‘are not consistent with the regulation’.

Those who qualify, and who at this stage are theoretically still subject to the legal fiction of “non-entry” – a status under border procedures whereby arrivals are not formally considered to have entered EU territory’ – are divided into groups of between 15 and 50 people. They are notified at a specific date and time, either by email or through lists posted at Reception and Identification Centres, and instructed to join a group video conference.

The session is conducted by a lawyer included on a designated register.

If an applicant fails to join the video conference, they lose their right to legal guidance unless they can demonstrate force majeure.

The lawyers opposing the scheme identify two fundamental problems: what lawyers are required to tell asylum seekers and the financial incentive attached to one particular outcome.

The €250 payment is explicitly additional to the €160 lawyers receive for conducting each video conference, irrespective of how many people participate.

The content of the sessions is divided into four broad thematic areas. Lawyers are expected to explain the asylum procedure, including how an application is submitted and how the asylum interview is conducted. They must also provide information on the Dublin Regulation, which determines which European state is responsible for examining an asylum claim, and explain family reunification procedures where family members are already elsewhere in Europe.

It is here, however, that the scheme moves beyond explaining procedure.

‘Strong’ and ‘weak’ refugee profiles

Svana described as ‘particularly problematic’ the introduction of the concept of a ‘strong refugee profile’.

Under the decision, she explained, a lawyer could be required to tell an Egyptian asylum seeker that they have a weak refugee profile without any individual examination of the circumstances of their case, as refugee law requires.

Because Egyptian applicants are rejected in the majority of cases, she said, lawyers would effectively be required to tell them that they fall within a category considered to have a ‘weak refugee profile’, potentially prejudging the asylum service’s eventual decision.

A Sudanese applicant, by contrast, could be told that they meet the characteristics of a ‘strong refugee profile’ because of the war in Sudan.

After applicants have been told that they do not possess the characteristics of a ‘strong refugee profile’, lawyers must then inform them of the severe penalties for unlawful entry and residence, as well as the possibility of entering a voluntary return programme.

The message conveyed, the lawyers argue, is difficult to separate from the government’s wider doctrine: return to your country or risk imprisonment.

And if, after this process, an asylum seeker opts to return, the lawyer receives the additional €250.

‘Not for €250, not for €250 million’

Alternative Intervention said it had decided to hold the event ‘in the middle of summer’ precisely because the Joint Ministerial Decision represented what it described as a fundamental departure from the institutional role of lawyers.

Lawyer Costas Papadakis argued that the legal profession’s institutional and social function is to defend society against state power, not to administer policies imposed by the authorities against society’s needs.

That role, he said, requires solidarity and respect for human rights, rather than participation in implementing the ‘return or prison’ doctrine repeatedly articulated by Plevris.

The decision, Papadakis said, ‘bribes lawyers with €250 to convince asylum seekers that they do not have a refugee profile and therefore to return’.

‘It is despicable and must be abolished.’

Papadakis also criticised the position taken by the Athens Bar Association’s plenary, which he said had assessed the decision positively while objecting only to two elements: the €250 payment and the supervision of meetings with asylum seekers by ministry administrative staff.

He said a delegation had met Plevris two hours before the relevant meeting and reached an informal agreement with him, after which the president of the Athens Bar Association read out an announcement by the minister.

Plevris agreed to restrict ministry supervision to the beginning and end of each session. No decision, however, was reached on the €250 payment.

‘And the meeting was dissolved with a vague promise that he would bring it back,’ Papadakis said.

For him, neither the amount of money nor the precise administrative arrangement addresses the underlying problem.

‘This diversion of the lawyer’s institutional role cannot continue’, he said, arguing that lawyers were being asked to serve not their clients’ interests but those of state power.

‘Not for €250, not for €250 million. It is not negotiable.’

Legal guidance as a safeguard for asylum seekers

Lawyer Katerina Tsapopoulou placed the Greek decision within the broader EU framework.

The Joint Ministerial Decision is a regulatory measure implementing provisions contained within the EU’s new migration and asylum framework.

Tsapopoulou said the concept of ‘legal guidance’ had been introduced by the EU legislator because additional safeguards were considered necessary under the new Pact on Migration and Asylum. The pact accelerates procedures for examining asylum applications while simultaneously reducing some of the guarantees available to applicants.

Legal guidance, she said, was intended to mitigate that imbalance.

‘Legal guidance is included after screening, upon request by asylum seekers. This is important because legal guidance does not come to secure the interests of the lawyer, but the procedural guarantees of the applicants, and it is included from the initial stage of the procedure.’

Its purpose, she continued, is explicitly linked to providing more rigorous information and legal support so that the administrative process functions more effectively and produces better-quality decisions.

‘It helps the applicant, not the lawyer.’

Tsapopoulou pointed to the interpretation of Article 16 of the relevant EU regulation by the European Union Agency for Asylum (EUAA), which distinguishes four different legal functions: a lawyer assisting without formally representing an applicant; a lawyer acting as their representative; a lawyer providing legal guidance; and a lawyer providing advice and information.

Legal guidance, in other words, is recognised as a distinct function rather than the simple transmission of general information.

‘It does not simply convey information,’ she said.

The Greek decision’s reliance on group sessions also sits uneasily, Tsapopoulou argued, with the regulation’s emphasis on individualised procedures, including the need to take account of factors such as race, gender and personal independence.

Both the European Commission and the EUAA use an applicant-centred approach, placing the asylum seeker at the heart of the process. The Greek system, she argued, reverses that logic.

She also stressed that neither Article 16 of the EU regulation nor the implementing legislation makes any reference to voluntary returns.

The Joint Ministerial Decision introduces them regardless, and then attaches a financial incentive for lawyers to one particular result.

‘It should be abolished,’ she concluded.

‘They are turning lawyers into return managers’

For lawyer Vasilis Kerasiotis, the measure forms part of a broader deterioration in the rights of third-country nationals.

Reading the decision, he said, ‘I was not surprised at all’, pointing to what he described as a continuous assault on migrant rights since September 2025.

‘We only need to remember the law that turns the criminal judge into a return manager. Every day, at the end of the hearing, we have the question: do you want to stay or leave? This blackmailing dilemma leads people not to defend themselves’, he said, because doing so can mean risking imprisonment.

‘This Joint Ministerial Decision now comes to turn the lawyer into a return manager, just like the criminal judge.’

Kerasiotis described as both ‘inconceivable’ and ‘unlawful’ the requirement for lawyers to divide asylum seekers into those deemed to have strong or weak refugee profiles while simultaneously warning them about severe criminal sanctions.

‘This kind of guidance cannot be provided.’

He cited the recent example of Javed Aslam who, he said, was found to have a refugee profile despite Pakistan being designated a safe country.

The example, he argued, demonstrates precisely why individual assessment cannot simply be replaced by assumptions based on nationality.

‘The vulnerable person’s waiver is being priced in’

Kerasiotis also focused on the professional obligations of lawyers themselves.

A lawyer’s overriding responsibility, he said, is to defend their client and exhaust the procedural means available to protect their interests. Lawyers are prohibited from reaching agreements with third parties that involve giving advice harmful to their client.

Against that background, he questioned the government’s claim that the legal guidance offered under the scheme would be neutral.

‘Thanos Plevris says that legal guidance will be neutral, but how, when it aims at a specific result, namely return, while also establishing a financial incentive? One understands the conflict of interests between the lawyer and the refugee.’

The lawyers’ code, Kerasiotis noted, requires the profession to be practised with absolute freedom and without external pressure. Under the new system, he argued, that independence is undermined as the lawyer becomes an instrument of state migration policy.

There is also, he said, a fundamental ethical problem in financially rewarding the waiver of rights by a vulnerable person deemed not to possess a ‘strong refugee profile’.

The lawyers’ code permits remuneration to depend on the outcome of a case where there is a written agreement between lawyer and client.

‘But here it is imposed and paid by a third party.’

‘It is an insult to the dignity of the legal profession and ethically unacceptable,’ Kerasiotis said. ‘It turns the lawyer from a protector of rights into an intermediary of voluntary removal.’

He argued that resistance should go beyond a boycott by members of the Athens Bar Association and include a petition seeking annulment of the decision.

Refugees trapped without access to asylum procedures

The dispute over legal guidance is unfolding against conditions that, according to Svana, have already left hundreds of newly arrived refugees and migrants trapped in a legal and administrative vacuum.

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum has been in force for a month, since 12 June. Yet Svana said Greece had failed to make the necessary preparations during the preceding two years, passing implementing legislation only at the last moment.

The result, she said, is that refugees and migrants are being held in camps in the eastern Aegean and on the mainland under what amounts to a de facto detention regime, but without formal detention orders.

Hundreds of people, she said, are isolated in extremely poor conditions: housed in containers without air conditioning during extreme heat, with families and infants crowded together without enough beds, clothing or personal hygiene products, and without adequate supplies of milk, nappies or activities for children.

On the islands in particular, new arrivals are transferred to separate facilities originally created during the pandemic and kept apart from the wider camp population.

Statutory deadlines are also not being met.

According to Svana, very few people are currently being granted asylum, while the Reception and Identification Service fails to provide answers about applicants’ status.

At the same time, the ministry’s online platform is not functioning, preventing asylum seekers from submitting applications, with no information being provided by the Ministry of Migration and Asylum.

‘At the moment, there is no means of accessing the asylum process in Greece.’

‘If last year we had a three-month suspension for North African refugees, now we are talking about a total suspension across the country for all arrivals,’ Svana said.

The consequences are particularly severe for people already on Greek territory who have not entered a Reception and Identification Centre or Closed Controlled Access Centre. They face arrest and the criminal penalties for unlawful entry and residence introduced under the legislation associated with Plevris.

‘There are cases of refugee women who go to Malakasa reception facility themselves to be registered, and the workers call the police to have them arrested. Syrian women are taken to the Amygdaleza detention centre and a return process begins.’

It is in precisely this environment, Svana stressed, that lawyers are now being asked to provide supposedly neutral ‘legal guidance’.

‘We have taken an oath’

For Svana, the group format itself renders meaningful legal assistance almost impossible.

The lawyer is expected to list general legal provisions for 15 or even 50 people at once, she said, thereby ‘legitimising a process of entrapment in the conditions I described’.

Providing the sessions by video conference raises further problems.

Reception and Identification Centres face infrastructure and equipment deficiencies. Confidentiality is also difficult to guarantee.

‘We laugh at the confidentiality issues of the process,’ she said.

A lawyer participating remotely is physically separated from the applicant, unable to establish normal eye contact or identify visible signs of vulnerability.

‘These administrative tasks could be assigned to specific employees,’ Svana argued.

Instead of being permitted access to the facilities in order to document possible violations, lawyers are being asked to provide what she described as a veneer of legitimacy.

‘Instead of the lawyer having access and recording violations, they are called upon to give a semblance of legitimacy to these circumstances. If lawyers had an opportunity to perform a role as guarantors of rights, with these provisions they have abdicated that competence, and in fact the plenary has accepted it.’

Svana acknowledged the obvious counterargument.

‘You can say: before, there was no legal guidance. Isn’t it better now?’

Her answer was no.

The EU Pact on Migration and Asylum establishes border procedures under which people are legally considered not yet to have entered the country. Return is therefore a very real possibility.

It is precisely because of that heightened risk, she argued, that the EU legislator provided for genuine legal advice.

‘The EU legislator provided for there to be real advice and not this travesty of advice’.’

Svana argued that the Joint Ministerial Decision ultimately creates a closed, tightly controlled mechanism for the provision of legal information while cutting civil society organisations off from direct contact with asylum seekers.

For her, this reflects a broader climate of hostility towards and criminalisation of NGOs.

‘Having as its goal not the protection of refugees but the creation of a system of effective returns, the ministry creates a controlled mechanism that the bar associations want to legitimise. Instead of promoting their role as guarantors, they come to co-manage. Why? To get European Union funds?’

‘We have taken an oath.’

A 44-slide PowerPoint, only five slides on law

Lawyer Eleni Kayou has been on the legal aid register since 2021 and, under the new decision, would be expected to provide legal guidance until 30 September.

She has already decided not to participate.

‘I will not participate, but I know that a good majority will participate. I understand that no application for annulment has been made because we are in the court recess, because there is not a word in the Joint Ministerial Decision that does not offend our work.’

Lawyers already on the register have received a 44-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining the new system, Kayou said.

Only five of those slides, she added, concern legal matters.

The political philosophy underpinning the scheme, she argued, is apparent from the first slide, which tells lawyers that ‘those who are truly refugees will remain’ in Greece.

Kayou also had a warning for lawyers who might regard the scheme as an opportunity for easy income.

‘Those who think that the payments are normal, I have to tell you that they are like birthdays. Once a year.’

The same department responsible for existing payments, she said, is now being asked to administer the expanded system without additional capacity.

‘The department currently cannot handle 90 to 100 people, which is how many of us there are. It is exactly the same department with the same supporting documents.’

The emergence of the ‘police lawyer’

Thanasis Kampayiannis, a member of the Athens Bar Association board representing Alternative Intervention, also challenged the way the bar association’s leadership had handled the dispute.

An initial decision had been taken that members of the register would not participate until the €250 payment was abolished.

During the board meeting, however, the president did not put the matter to a vote. A subsequent decision then withdrew the recommendation that bar associations abstain from the programme.

For Kampayiannis, the implications are clear: the organised legal profession has now effectively accepted its role in implementing the Joint Ministerial Decision.

Even the dispute over the €250 payment risks obscuring the more fundamental issue.

According to Kampayiannis, Plevris’s position amounts to saying: ‘I will not abolish it, but I will let the plenary decide whether you will take it, so that I can speak without an intermediary and say, “I want to give the money but they won’t let me”.’

The result, he argued, is a new hybrid figure: the ‘police lawyer’.

Kampayiannis compared the role envisioned under the Joint Ministerial Decision with the procedure under which people facing criminal prosecution are handed documents informing them of their rights, a task usually carried out by police officers.

The real question, he said, is whether lawyers should accept a function that could readily be performed by someone else.

‘My own opinion is that we don’t want it.’

Doing so, he argued, would distract from the far more urgent need for substantive legal representation in a system where access to rights has already been drastically reduced.

‘It is an obstacle to claiming the real legal material in this black hole of rights. There is legal material. It is the defence material of lawyers and it should be extended to the misdemeanour courts, which are now putting people in prison. 3,700 people are being held for misdemeanours.’

Kampayiannis closed with a sober assessment of the institutional balance within the Athens Bar Association.

Under the current circumstances, he said, there is little prospect that the association itself will file an application seeking annulment of the Joint Ministerial Decision.

His conclusion was therefore directed not at the ministry but at his fellow lawyers:

‘Let’s organise our resistance so that we don’t let it happen.’

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