An open letter to European leaders: stop punishing asylum seekers on the Greek islands
I have just come back from the Greek islands, and I was shocked by what I saw and by the accounts I heard from my colleagues on the ground.
They told me about a 12-year-old boy who came to our clinic in Moria, on Lesbos, after repeatedly self-harming by cutting his head with a knife. And they told me about another child, a 9-year-old girl with serious injuries from a bomb blast in Afghanistan. She was still smiling when she arrived in Greece. But in the months she’s been trapped on Lesbos she has stopped talking, stopped eating, and completely withdrawn from life.
