Moria 2.0 – Systemic Human Rights Violation and the Chance of a Pilot Decision

Abstract

After more than half a decade since their creation, refugee camps on the Aegean islands, and especially Mavrovouni – the successor camp to Moria, the largest refugee camp within the European Union – continue to face massive criticism. Despite substantial funding and the subsiding of refugee flows, the camps continue to suffer from serious structural deficiencies. With the EU Commission’s recent announcement that it intends to maintain refugee camps for the near future, there is growing concern about a permanent space with lower legal standards of protection than anywhere else on European territory. The permanent state of extreme material poverty can no longer be reconciled with basic guarantees from Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Given that, the possibility of a pilot procedure by the European Court of Human Rights, which has received little attention in this context so far, provides an opportunity to restore these guarantees and to link them to the concept of refugee camps in a binding way for the future hotspot approach.