Makis Voridis, the Minister of Immigration and Asylum, spoke on Wednesday morning about the creation of a legislative framework that “will create pressure for voluntary departures” of illegal immigrants.

He told SKAI radio, “we will exhaust every legal possibility that exists and what is a mandate is to be able to create an effective framework that will create pressure for voluntary departures,” adding that “to a large extent it will be a national framework.”

At the same time, he announced “legal battles” with courts that would not apply the law by invoking human rights.

“One issue is the protection of human rights, another issue is turning human rights into an ideology in order to achieve certain political agendas. In this context there will be major legal battles,” Voridis said.

Clarifying his reasoning even further, Voridis said this would happen “if I see apparently absurd court decisions that flout the legal reality of Greek and European courts that these people; those whose asylum claims are being rejected, are being held illegally. We cannot subsequently, when sanctions are applied for their illegal stay, say that there is a question of rights,” Minister of Immigration and Asylum concluded on this issue.

He stressed that the effective guarding of the borders and the huge effort by the Coast Guard have contributed to the fact that the migrant flows from Evros are almost zero, while from the sea they do not have the intensity of the past.