United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

The European Commission awarded another 20 million euros to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to improve reception conditions in Greece, notably on the island of Lesvos, the Commission said in a press release on Monday.

Seven restaurants in Greece opened their kitchens to refugee chefs this week to celebrate the World Refugee Day.

The Refugee Food Festival, a project launched by a citizen's initiative in Paris in 2016, has expanded with the support of the UNHCR to three continents this year, reaching 15 host cities and 100 restaurants.

The Flux Laboratory, in cooperation with the Greek government and the Swiss Embassy in Athens, has organized an exhibition of portraits of refugees by renowned photographer Mark Henley, marking World Refugee Day on June 20. Henley has twice won the Swiss Photographer of the Year award with work focusing on issues varying from banking to the Iran nuclear negotiations.

The number of refugees, asylum seekers and people with no citizenship in Greece totaled 58,000 in early June, according to figures released by the Greek chapter of the UNHCR on Wednesday, World Refugee Day.

Nearly half of those are children, the annual Global Trends study has found.

"Leading the displacement during the year was the crisis in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war in South Sudan and the flight into Bangladesh from Myanmar of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees," a press release said.

"Muslims are terrorists, and refugees might bring terrorism to Greece," a seventh-grader says loudly to her friends during a class break. Mohammed, an Iraqi-Syrian refugee, sits just a couple of meters away. While situations like this do not occur often, they are an indication of the struggles for integration that affect refugees in the Greek education system.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on April 11 launched a new two-year plan aiming to further improve lives of Syrian refugees in Turkey. 

The European Commission announced Monday new funding of 180 million euros for aid projects in Greece, including to expand the flagship Emergency Support to Integration & Accommodation (ESTIA) program.

ESTIA helps get refugees into urban accommodation and out of camps and provides them with regular cash assistance.

A little-known extreme right-wing group has claimed responsibility for Thursday's arson attack on an Afghan community center in central Athens that caused significant damage, but no injuries.

A group calling itself Krypteia claimed responsibility in a call to a Greek news website on Friday.

Notwithstanding a rise in tensions between Brussels and Ankara - recently exacerbated by Turkey's increasingly aggressive stance toward Greece and Cyprus - the European Commission will be approving an additional 3 billion euros in funding for Syrian refugees living in Turkey, EU officials said on Wednesday, Ekathimerini reported.