ATHENS – “We do not expect tension in the migration issue, but we are also prepared so that an unexpected event will not affect us, as it did not affect us in March 2020,” Migration and Asylum Minister, Notis Mitarachi, said on Thursday in an interview with OPEN TV.

Mitarachi estimated that Turkey “will not try again to instrumentalize migration due to our policy, because it can no longer have the result it would like” and added that “the fact that Turkey can not use “migration as a negotiating tool towards the European Union is crucial for Greece.”

As he noted, on Friday, June 10 he will participate in the Council of Interior Ministers in Luxembourg, where “we will raise the issue of Turkey, the issue of instrumentalization, but also the issue of further strengthening FRONTEX, so that the European presence clarifies that our borders are not just national borders, but also the borders of the EU.”

“Our country, now, with a comprehensive policy – with the protection of the maritime borders, the closed type structures, the tightening of the legislation and everything else that we have done – has managed to have very low flows,” Mitarachi stressed adding that 44,000 people were accomodated on the islands at the peak of the crisis, while today they are below 2,000.