PERMANENT MISSION OF GREECE TO THE OSCE

STATEMENT MADE BY THE GREEK DELEGATION IN EXERCISE OF ITS RIGHT OF REPLY

This is the response to the statement made by the NGOs Greek Helsinki Monitor and Minority Rights Group-Greece, which have also circulated a written report on the subject of their statement, titled Greece’s Stateless Persons.

The statement and the report center on Article 19 of the Greek Citizenship Code, on the basis of which a number of people have lost their Greek citizenship. But, as is made clear in both the statement and the report, Article 19 has now, for more than a year, been abolished. It is a thing of the past, it belongs in the past. And it is appropriate that the grammatical tense used in the report is the past tense.

The question is posed what to do with the people who have lost their citizenship. The position of the Greek Government on this is clear: those wishing to acquire Greek citizenship may apply for it, following the legal procedure provided for by Greek law. In fact, a lot of former Article-19 cases have applied for Greek citizenship and some have already been granted it.

Mention is also made of the question of citizenship of the Roma population in Greece. Here, too, the report makes it clear that the Roma in Greece have Greek citizenship.

The speaker referred to some people, numbering in his own words fewer than 100, whose right to Greek citizenship has not been established. And he mentioned one instance, expanded at some length in the report, of one person, Mr. Sezgin, who has been trying to obtain Greek citizenship and whose efforts have not yet been successful.

Mr. Chairman, we welcome that such shortcomings of local administration in Greece are brought to our attention. I wonder, however, whether they 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. I think that if all the states represented here were subjected to the same scrutiny as the one applied to Greece, it would not be surprising to find in every single state 100 instances of persons whose right to the citizenship of the country where they reside is not established,

Mr. Chairman, I wish to acknowledge with gratitude the expression of condolences for the tragic loss of the Alternate Foreign Minister, Yiannos Kranidiotis, who was one of the foremost promoters in Greece of respect for human rights and a strong supporter of NGOs. I should add that he was instrumental in the abolition of Article 19.