Right of asylum

A total of 150 people in an accommodation facility in the town of Kranidi, in southern Greece, have tested positive for the new coronavirus, Deputy Civil Protection Minister Nikos Hardalias told jousnalists after visiting the site on Tuesday.

Hardalias said 148 of these are refugees, one is an employee, and one is an aid worker. All patients are asymptomatic, he said.

Forty-seven unaccompanied asylum-seeking minors were relocated from Greece to Germany Saturday.

Germany's interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said the evacuation was "the result of months of preparation and intense talks with our European partners" and expressed hope that other countries would also begin taking in refugee children soon.

Twenty unaccompanied refugee minors were scheduled to leave the overcrowded camp of Moria on Lesvos island on Tuesday for mainland Greece, from where they will depart for Germany and relocation there on April 18.
In addition, another 20 asylum applicants are also leaving for Piraeus through a program of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, to be housed in facilities on the mainland.

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian and Syrian refugees living in overcrowded and rundown camps in Lebanon are bracing for the novel coronavirus as aid groups mobilize to help.    

Lebanon is home to tens of thousands of Palestinians in camps that over the decades have become bustling neighborhoods and at least 1.5 million Syrians who have fled the war next door.    

A facility belonging to a locally based non-governmental organization called Stand By Me Lesvos was destroyed in a fire in the early hours of Tuesday, local media on the eastern Aegean island have reported.

The United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees signed in Geneva in 1951, and amended by the Protocol signed in New York in 1967, defines a refugee as "someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion."

The Turkish Coast Guard has rescued 34 asylum seekers off the Aegean coast, state-run Anadolu Agency reported. 
The coast guard rescued the group of people, who were in rubber boats which had been driven to Turkish territorial waters by the Greek Coast Guard, the agency cited anonymous security sources as saying.

Berlin will take in 80 to 100 children from Greek refugee camps, an official in the German capital said on Tuesday, as concern mounts about migrants amassing on the Turkish-Greek border.

A total of 60 asylum seekers - over half of them children - were rescued off Turkey's Aegean coast, security sources said on March 8.

Turkish Coast Guard teams said in a statement that a group of Afghans in a rubber boat, including 33 children, were rescued while attempting to cross to Greek islands.

A European show of force to help secure Greece's borders coupled with extra EU cash for Turkey "will likely stabilize refugee flows in the short term," according to a note by risk consultancy think tank issued Thursday.