More than 200 illegal immigrants started a hunger strike in Athens on Tuesday to seek legal residence status, in the latest sign of a growing crisis in the recession-hit EU frontier state. Nine in ten illegal immigrants use Greece as a gateway to the European Union. The country, long-criticised for its poor handling of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants, says it cannot cope and those without papers must leave.
The young men, most of them North Africans living on the island of Crete, travelled to Athens over the weekend and settled in the Law University for the hunger strike. Parliament approved earlier this month a new asylum law, which creates an independent asylum administration to oversee reception centres across the country.
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