GREEK HELSINKI MONITOR & 
MINORITY RIGHTS GROUP - GREECE

CITIZENSHIP AND STATELESSNESS

Greece applies abusively the internationally accepted discretion of states on citizenship matters. It may allow applications for naturalization to remain unanswered for many years, even more than ten. While its repeated commitment to reduce statelessness is questioned by slow administrative procedures that seem encouraged by the absence of political will.

In his 1998 report, the Greek Ombudsman highlights the arbitrariness of the Greek authorities with respect to naturalization. A French citizen had been waiting for more than ten years to get an answer to her naturalization request. Following the intervention of the Ombudsman described in his 1998 report, the authorities granted citizenship to that person in the summer of 1999. The positive outcome indicates that she was clearly meeting the requirements but the administration did not feel constrained to process the application for more than a decade, certainly an abusive and humiliating attitude towards the individual concerned. The Ombudsman’s recommendation, that a reasonable time limit for the response be set, has -to this day- been ignored by the Ministry.

Following international embarrassment, Article 19 of the Greek Citizenship Code, allowing the state to strip minority citizens of their citizenship, was abolished in 1998. Past "victims" of that article included stateless residents of Greece who had unjustly been stripped of their citizenship in first place, as they had never settled abroad, a prerequisite of Article 19. In the last two years, many ministers had been promising they would recover their citizenship. Finally, in mid-1999, they were asked to apply for naturalization, as if they were foreigners.

By early September 2000, only a dozen of the over 100 applicants have been granted citizenship. The whole process has been humiliating. It included a state recommendation that they change their names and an insistence they submit unnecessary documents. The first persons granted citizenship were Aysel Zeybek, Stateless Project Coordinator of our NGOs, her mother and two of her sisters (but not her father nor her younger sister), even though they refused to submit all unnecessary documents, thus proving that the procedure selected was abusive. A. Zeybek’s statement on the day of her swearing in as Greek citizen (11 September 2000) is telling:

"We are happy today, but it is not a great happiness. We are also sad and in wonder. There are 3 reasons for that…

 

First of all our father is still stateless. And the reason that he is not given Greek citizenship is because he does not have a clean penal record. He was fined many times as he was operating a small shop in our village without a license, which he could not get as he was a stateless person.

 

The second reason of our half happiness is that the 100-150 stateless persons who live in Greece have not all been granted Greek citizenship. The East Macedonia and Thrace Regional State Secretary General had said that all the stateless that have applied for Citizenship via Naturalization would be granted citizenship within 60 days. This promise given to these people, who were stateless for years, has not been honored.

 

The third point of our unhappiness is the procedure used to grant us Greek citizenship. The Greek state, to avoid further international embarrassment, was forced to first give us identity documents and now citizenship. But, instead of restoring our citizenship, it has applied the naturalization procedure. This is humiliating for us and we are denouncing it."

 

Greece must swiftly grant citizenship to all stateless residing in Greece regardless of their penal record. It should also introduce the possibility to grant citizenship to the few thousand former Greek citizens who are now living as stateless abroad.

Another category of Muslims was born stateless. Their ancestors moved from Bulgaria and subsequently lost their citizenship. These individuals (considered as Roma but self-identified as Turks) were forced by police to acquire expensive alien’s residence permits valid only for one year: on them police authorities mentioned they were of "undefined" citizenship. The police department of Komotini refused in 1999 and again in 2000 to give a stateless identity document (an obligation under the relevant UN Convention) to one of them, Mr. Sezgin Durgut. Eight months after his application and only after the Ombudsman stepped in, police alleged that the reference to an undefined citizenship was a mistake that had supposedly being repeated for years. They claimed that Mr. Sezgin had Bulgarian citizenship, and asked him to prove that he is not Bulgarian in order to consider him a stateless person. They made the same argument in answering a parliamentary question tabled by the Progressive Left Coalition MP, Maria Damanaki.

But as far back as in 1997, Sezgin Durgut had provided the Greek authorities with a Bulgarian Consulate certificate saying that he was not a Bulgarian citizen. The Greek state was aware of that but was regrettably deceptively pretending it was not. A year ago, in this OSCE forum, the Greek delegation, probably misled by local authorities, also provided inaccurate information. They said:

"I wonder, however, whether [such cases are] really worthy of being discussed in a forum like this, considering in particular that the persons involved cannot be said to be suffering let alone being endangered in any way. Those are cases of people going through a routine administrative process and encountering difficulties in it."

 

However, Mr. Durgut is suffering, as he has no identity papers at all. One consequence is that he cannot receive benefits for his children. Moreover, his petition to receive Greek citizenship dates from 1990; even though he should have been granted citizenship immediately, as the son of a stateless father and a Greek mother, on the basis of the relevant U.N. Convention. After all, his sister was granted citizenship on that ground in 1993. Mr. Durgut resubmitted the same document of the Bulgarian authorities, in February 2000, applying for a second time to obtain a stateless identity card, but has not received any answer. The Greek Foreign Ministry, under pressure from the Ombudsman, has asked the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry to confirm the information in the 1997 document issued by the Bulgarian Consulate in Salonica. Months have gone by and no progress is made. Is all that "routine administrative process," as Greece claimed in this forum last year?

We appeal at this OSCE meeting to the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry to speed up whatever answer they have to give to the Greek authorities so as to help expose the latter’s real intentions: they do not want to admit that they had for years been harassing Mr. Durgut against all Greek and international laws and have even provided related misleading information to the Greek Parliament and the OSCE. In the meantime, for having dared challenge the Greek administration, for it Sezgin Durgut does not exist; he cannot travel abroad, have his driving license extended for his work or get a family allowance. Occasionally, policemen have even verbally abused him.