The President of the Greek Council of State announced on 21 March 2025, that on 27 February 2025, the Plenary of the Council of State convened a conference on five cases relating to:

a) the establishment of a national list of safe third countries that includes Türkiye as a safe third country for applicants for international protection with a country of origin of Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Somalia; and

b) decisions of Independent Appeals Committees, by which requests for international protection based on the designation of Türkiye as a safe third country were rejected as inadmissible.

The cases were discussed in the Plenary meeting during the hearing of 7 February 2025.

The Council of State ruled, by majority, that from the information in the file accompanying the joint decision 538595/12.12.2023 of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Immigration and Asylum "Determination of third countries classified as safe and drawing up a national list as defined in Article 91 of Law 4939/2022 […]" (B´ 7063) and, in particular, from the recommendation of the Director of the Asylum Service, it does not appear that the criteria set out in Article 91 of Law 4939/2022 (Article 38 of Directive 2013/32/EU) were duly assessed for the classification of Türkiye as a safe third country for the aforementioned categories of aliens. This is because the proposal with the attached Annex is limited to citing the texts of the international sources that were taken into account, without specifically evaluating the information contained in the sources in relation to the criteria set out in the law, to document the presence of the legal conditions for the designation. For this reason, the Council of State ruled that the above joint ministerial decision 538595/12.12.2023 should be annulled, insofar as it concerns the designation of Türkiye as a safe third country for applicants for international protection with countries of origin Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Somalia.

Furthermore, the Council of State unanimously ruled that the individual decisions of the Independent Appeals Committees, by which the requests for international protection of the applicants of Afghan nationality were rejected on the grounds that they entered Greece from Türkiye, must be annulled. This is because, since it is clear from the information in the file that Türkiye has generally suspended the readmission of applicants for international protection to its territory since March 2020, the competent Greek authorities, as accepted by the decision of the CJEU of 4 October 2024 in case C-134/23, may not reject applications for international protection as inadmissible on the basis of Article 33(2)(c) of Directive 2013/32/EU and the corresponding provision of national law, on the grounds that Türkiye is a safe third country.