United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon will be in Athens on Friday to meet with Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias and Migration Policy Minister Yiannis Mouzalas.
The focus of his trip to Greece is to discuss the refugee crisis and the latest efforts Greece has taken on in order to process asylum seekers and setting up new committees to deal with the backlog of claims that have been filed.
Ban’s visit comes just one week after a new process for registering asylum seekers was launched in Greece where a new pre-registration process aims at speeding up the process by which families can be reunified and requests for relocation for migrants who wish to move on from Greece to other EU countries.
Following his visit in Athens, Ban will make his way to the Greek island of Lesvos, a central focus point of the refugee crisis that has been at the forefront of receiving an enormous influx of migrants trying to gain access and reach Western Europe.
Although the flow of migrants has abated some since March when Turkey and the EU struck a deal to return some migrants who reach Greece back to Turkey, on Thursday, coast guard officers rescued 60 migrants off the coast of Lesvos as their vessel carrying them from Turkey foundered.
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