A/HRC/16/52/Add.4 E. Refugees and asylum-seekers Access to refugee protection/Non-refoulement38 1. 58. Upon arrival, refugees are systematically detained, registered and their fingerprints are taken. However, due to the great number of new arrivals every day and the lack of staff, and in particular of interpreters, an adequate registration and documentation is often not possible. The Special Rapporteur has come across several cases where the nationality of aliens has been wrongly identified. This can have serious consequences for refugees who are wrongly identified as Iraqis Iranian or Syrian, who could be returned to Turkey under the Greek-Turkish Readmission Agreement. 59. Many refugees are not informed of the procedures for seeking protection or have claimed that it is not possible for them to make their protection claim heard due to the lack of interpreters. Only in the border-guard station in Feres did the Special Rapporteur come across information brochures in different languages on the asylum procedure in Greece. While in principle all police authorities should accept asylum applications, the Special Rapporteur was informed that the respective police authorities often reject the responsibility for accepting and forwarding asylum applications and tell the applicants to go to the main directorates responsible for the processing of asylum claims. Thus, detained asylum-seekers often have to wait for their release until they can make a claim. The responsible directorates were said to lack the capacities to deal with the many asylum applications in the country. The Special Rapporteur was informed that the main authority in Attica, Petrou Ralli, was so severely understaffed that it had at times accepted asylum claims on only one day of the week and then was not able to register more than around 20 applications. 60. But even those who are able to file their claims fall victim to the country’s highly dysfunctional asylum system. The first-instance procedure is in the hands of police authorities who lack the necessary capacities and expertise in accepting and processing the large number of applications. There is no system of free legal aid and a general lack of registered lawyers. Further, in practice interpreters were reported to be largely unavailable during the interviews making the assessment of a claim practically impossible. As a consequence, the quality of the decisions was said to be very poor and Greece has the lowest protection rates at first instance in the EU close to zero.39 The dysfunctional system has created a backlog of more than 52,000 cases to be examined as of August 2010. With the abolition of the independent Appeals Board there is now only a limited form of appeal available before the Council of State. However, it can only investigate into the legality of the administrative ruling but not the merits of a claim. Also in the second instance procedure the protection rates are very low (2.87 per cent in 2009). As a consequence, refugees seeking protection in Greece had no confidence in the asylum procedures and very often refrained from filing a claim despite a serious fear of being returned to their country of origin. 61. In the detention facilities that the Special Rapporteur visited, he witnessed great misinformation among the detainees about the asylum system, further increasing the stress caused by the appalling detention conditions. Some detainees thought they already filed an asylum claim at their registration and taking of the fingerprints. Also, many aliens were 38 39 Since 2 June 2010, over 33,000 irregular migrants have been detected crossing the Greek-Turkish land border. The largest group (47 per cent) coming from Afghanistan. The next largest groups were from Algeria (17 per cent), Pakistan (8 per cent). Somalia (7 per cent) and Iraq (5 per cent). See http://frontex.europa.eu/newsroom/news. In 2009, 15,928 asylum applications were made but only 36 asylum-seekers were granted refugee status and 130 asylum-seekers were granted humanitarian status and subsidiary protection. 15