ELA Case Referred to the CJEU: Access to Effective Legal Remedies in the asylum procedure
A case litigated by Equal Legal Aid has resulted in a preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), raising a fundamental question about access to effective legal remedies in the asylum procedure in Greece.
Under EU and Greek law, asylum seekers whose application for international protection is rejected at first instance are entitled to free legal aid—provided by lawyers included in the legal aid register maintained by the Asylum Service—to challenge that decision and to benefit from a full and ex nunc assessment of their application for international protection at the second instance.
However, in this case, the applicant’s appeal was rejected as inadmissible for being out of time, despite this being due to no fault of his own. Although the applicant had requested, within the statutory deadline, the appointment of a lawyer by the Asylum Service and had exercised due diligence in pursuing his case, the appointed lawyer failed to contact him and did not submit the appeal within the prescribed time limit, a failure that cannot be attributed to any extraordinary or unforeseeable circumstance (i.e., force majeure).
In 2022, with the support of a lawyer collaborating with ELA, the applicant filed an application for annulment before the Administrative Court of Thessaloniki, seeking to safeguard his fundamental rights and prevent the risk of being returned to a country where his life would be in danger without a substantive examination of his appeal.
The Administrative Court of Thessaloniki, with decision 72/2026, referred the case to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling with the following question:
Whether it is compatible with the right to an effective remedy for an administrative appeal against a first-instance decision rejecting an application for international protection to be dismissed as out of time where the requirements laid down in Greek law have not been complied with, namely, the obligation to inform the appellant of the lawyer appointed to represent them and to ensure effective communication between the appellant and the lawyer, and where the appointed lawyer has failed to act with the required due diligence.
The case raises fundamental concerns about access to effective legal remedies in the asylum procedure, particularly where applicants risk removal without their claims being examined on the merits due to failures attributable to state-appointed legal representatives. Perhaps most notably, the scale of this problem is growing: the number of out-of-time appeals has been increasing sharply the past three years: In 2022, 1,096 appeals (18% of inadmissible decisions) were dismissed as out of time, rising to 1,523 (30%) in 2023, 1,526 (33%) in 2024, and 1,732 (49%) in 2025.
