This month, the Legal Centre Lesvos celebrates its tenth anniversary!
Our organisation is nearly as old as the EU-Turkey Deal, the policy that fundamentally reshaped Europe’s borders and the very reason the Centre was created. We launched a crowdfunding campaign in July 2016 in order to set up the Centre, calling on people to “Help us to speak truth to power!”.
Ten years later, with your support, that small group of legally trained volunteers who came together on Lesvos to provide legal information to people arriving to the island, has grown into the organisation we are today.
Over the past decade, we have:
- Trained and worked together with more than 100 legally trained volunteers and over 50 interpreters;
- Provided legal support and/or representation in over 4600 cases, supporting over 10,000 people from 70 countries in cases of asylum, migration, criminal defense, and litigation;
- Provided Emergency Legal Assistance to more than 6,000 unregistered asylum seekers since 2022.
Over these ten years, the challenges have changed, but the need for legal support has not.
Since 2020, the Legal Centre Lesvos has been at the forefront of efforts against border violence by the Greek authorities and representation of criminalised migrants. As other humanitarian and legal actors have withdrawn from border areas due to the increasing risks associated with this work, our lawyers have continued to provide critical, and often life-saving, legal assistance to newly arrived unregistered asylum seekers, in addition to documenting hundreds of cases of pushbacks and attempted pushbacks.
Over the years, what began as legal assistance provided to people arriving on Lesvos has expanded to other parts of Greece where legal assistance is virtually unavailable. This has included supporting survivors of the Pylos shipwreck, and those criminalised under Greece’s broad and expanding anti-smuggling legislation. As migration policies at both the Greek and European levels become increasingly restrictive, we have taken on legal representation of growing numbers of people criminalised simply for crossing borders or being forced to steer the boats in which they travelled.
The implementation of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, alongside recent legislative changes in Greece making it a crime to be undocumented, are expected to expand detention and further restrict access to legal assistance. In this context, our work, including providing legal representation to people detained at the border, will become more important than ever.
To mark our tenth anniversary, we have launched a fundraising campaign to help sustain our work for the years to come. If you are able, we would be incredibly grateful if you considered making a donation through the button below. Every contribution helps us continue providing free legal assistance and challenging human rights violations of people on the move. If you are in Lesvos, join us to celebrate! You can find the full program of events below:
- August 24th: “Nice Lie”, Screening and Discussion with director Fridoon Joinda, Municipal Amphitheatre
- August 29th: Party, LCL Office
- August 30th: Beach gathering, Fikiotripa beach
Thank you to all the volunteers, lawyers, human rights defenders, interpreters, supporters, and allies who have been a part of our work over the last decade. Your solidarity has made our work possible and enabled us to continue speaking truth to power for the past ten years. We hope you will continue with us into the future.