Greece started, on Monday, the transfer of 1,500 asylum seekers from the northern Aegean island of Lesvos to the mainland on two chartered catamaran vessels.
The first 650 people were transferred early Monday morning and the rest later on Monday. The asylum seekers will be moved to migrant camps in Nea Kavala, near the city of Kilkis in northern Greece.
Meanwhile, another 300 refugees and migrants reached the coast of Lesvos at the weekend, increasing the number of those living in Moria, the main refugee settlement on Lesvos, to about 11,000. The camp was originally designed to host 3,000 at most.
NGO’s describe camps on the islands as stretched to breaking point with men, women and children forced to live in squalid conditions.
The Greek government on Saturday announced a new “robust” migration policy that, it says, will address the increase of migration flows to the Aegean islands over the last months.
“We are seeing huge waves being brought in by traffickers using new methods and better and faster boats,” the country’s civil protection minister, Michalis Chrysochoidis, said after the measures were announced at the weekend.
“If the situation were to continue we’d have a repeat of 2015. We are going to take measures to protect our borders and we are going to be much stricter, much faster in applying them.”
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