NGOs that come out of nowhere and ghost organizations in the Mitarakis register
The government seems to be applying double standards in regards to the treatment of certain non-governmental organizations active in the field of immigration / refugee crisis, sometimes even bypassing regulations of its own legislation.
In the third and final part of our report on the register of greek and foreign Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) active in the fields of international protection, immigration and social inclusion, inside story’s research has identified numerous paradoxes:
- Out of the just 29 NGOs in the register, there are at least three newly-listed entities which do not seem to fully meet or even roughly cover the criteria set by the Ministry of Immigration and Asylum for their registration and concurrent certification. This occurs while applications from other NGOs have been rejected for non-fulfillment to the dot of wide-ranging and possibly discriminatory evaluation criteria such as eg the effectiveness of their activities. At the same time, there are cases of organizations that were excluded on the grounds that they did not submit documents - which they had actually posted on the online platform or sent electronically - or due to lack of supporting documents which in any case they couldn’t possess, such as balance sheets and two-year action reports, for organizations that started to operate in 2019 or 2020.
- Under the current legal framework, which became more restrictive in 2020