UN: Refugees must be moved from Aegean islands

By Bayram Altug

GENEVA (AA) – Poor conditions on Aegean islands for refugees means the process of moving them to the Greek mainland should be speeded up, the UN said on Friday.

Speaking in Geneva, UNHCR spokesman Adrian Edwards said conditions at many sites on the islands remain “very poor”.

The UN agency is now worried about weekend weather reports which forecast temperatures to drop significantly.

"The slow pace of registration or the identification of vulnerable people and previously the shortage of space in mainland Greece have been factors that have slowed the transfer process," he said.

Edwards said the situation on the Greek islands of Samos, Chios and Lesbos were of particular concern. On Samos, just kilometers from the Turkish coast, 700 people including young children were living in unheated tents, the UNCHR official said.

EU countries were urged to keep their promises to help Greece through relocating asylum-seekers to other member states.

Only 12 percent of the thousands of asylum seekers who had come to Greece had been relocated, Edwards said.

Over 351,000 migrants or refugees crossed into Greece and Italy since the beginning of 2016 compared with 883,393 by this time in 2015, according to an International Organization for Migration (IOM) report released Dec. 6 last year.