Greek Migration Centers Order to Stop Providing Food to Refugees

Greece's Court of Audit on Tuesday ordered the country's migration and registration centers to stop handing out food to refugees for 24 hours due to the previous government's illegal use of state funds, local media reported.

MOSCOW (Sputnik) — The Court found that the government had used funds from the state budget to cover the cost of feeding migrants without first putting the contract out to tender to select the catering companies to supply these services, in violation of the country's laws, the Greek newspaper Kathimerini reported.

In addition, police on the Greek island of Lesbos, to where almost 30,000 refugees have arrived in the last two weeks, released all migrants from registration centers, citing insufficient funds to supply them all with food.

Greece, like many EU member states, is struggling to cope with a massive inflow of refugees from conflict-torn countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

Earlier this month, EU leaders failed to agree on the redistribution of 120,000 refugees, currently located in Greece, Italy and Hungary — the countries most heavily affected by the refugee influx — among the bloc's other member states.

In August, after the government headed by Syriza party leader Alexis Tsipras resigned, a draft presidential decree was announced to grant temporary asylum to thousands of refugees.

On Monday, shortly after Tsipras won the parliamentary election, the Hellenic Council of State, the supreme administrative court of Greece, deemed the August decree to be illegal, claiming that granting asylum to an undefined number of people without clearly determining the reason for asylum is against the country's law.