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Eviction of Roma, Patras, Greece
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Violator Award - Greece
Greece has been named one of three Housing Rights Violators in 2006, for persistently violating the right to adequate housing of Roma.
Each year, the Geneva-based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) awards its Housing Rights Violator Awards to three governments guilty of particularly serious and pervasive housing rights violations in the preceding year. COHRE has issued its Violator Awards since 2002. This year, Greece shares the Violator Awards with Nigeria and the Philippines. This is the first time that COHRE presents one of its Violator Awards to an EU country.
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Greece: Facts at a glance
- There are approximately 300,000 individuals of Roma origin living in Greece. Tent dwellers account for a large number of Roma who live in some 52 improvised and dangerous encampments throughout Greek territory.
- A study by the Public Urban Planning and Housing Enterprise (DEPOS) of Greece in 1999 revealed that 38 percent of Roma lived in sheds and tents, while the remainder lived in poorly built ‘houses.’
- According to data from the Greek Police, between 1 January 1996 and 30 June 2006, police officers took part in 79 forced evictions of Roma ordered by courts (and many more without court orders), and lodged 323 lawsuits against Roma for illegal settlements under the Sanitary Regulations.
- Since the beginning of 2006, municipal authorities demolished 68 homes in Patras, leaving nearly 340 Roma homeless. A further 10 Roma families (50 people) were rendered homeless when an inter-municipal “ecological” company demolished their homes without a court order in their absence.
- At present, over 200 Roma households in the Votanikos district of Athens are threatened with eviction to make way for the construction of a football stadium.
- Forty Greek Roma families and 20 Albanian Roma families (with legal residency status in Greece) in the area of Marousi (Greater Athens) were forcibly evicted from their homes in 2002, to make way for the construction of facilities for the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, without being provided with adequate compensation or resettlement.
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| GREECE FACT SHEET |
Download the complete Housing Rights Fact Sheet on Greece here.
Released 5 December 2006
 download doc [en]
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