Pregnant Woman Who Set Herself on Fire Could Face Arson Charges

A pregnant woman is recovering in a Greek hospital after setting herself on fire when she believed a request for asylum had been denied.

Adding to the horror of what rights groups say is an already nightmarish situation in Greek migrant camps, the 26-year-old woman, a mother to young children, is facing potential arson charges after her tent caught fire.

A fire service official told VICE World News that a magistrate took the woman’s testimony in hospital Friday, where she was being detained, to determine whether she should be charged with arson, a felony offence. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity as they said they were not authorised to give public statements.

The woman cannot leave the country until a judicial council decides whether she will face a criminal court – a decision which could take about a year – and her lawyers are hoping for an acquittal before the case goes to court.

The woman was released from detention after speaking to the magistrate, but will remain in hospital until she gives birth.

The incident took place at the main migrant camp on the Greek island of Lesvos on Sunday. According to Greece’s Kathimerini newspaper, the woman, originally from Afghanistan and who had been granted refugee status, had been scheduled to travel to Germany with her family on February the 17th. But officials told her that her travel would need to be postponed, due to her being in the eighth month of her pregnancy.

According to reports, the woman placed her children outside the tent, before setting it alight while she was still inside. The woman was taken to hospital for treatment for her burns, which are reportedly not life threatening, and the fire was extinguished before it could spread to other parts of the camp.

According to an AFP report, citing a source at Greece’s migration ministry, the woman had not understood that authorities wanted her to remain in Greece only until she gave birth, but thought her request for relocation to Germany had been refused altogether.

The incident is just the latest tragic story to emerge from Greece’s squalid migrant camps in the Aegean islands, which act as de facto holding pens for irregular migration through Turkey into Europe.

Under a 2016 migration deal struck between the European Union and Turkey, people are held in camps on the islands until their applications are processed, amid deteriorating conditions, overcrowding and a prevailing mood of extreme desperation.

The situation has created what aid groups describe as a mental health emergency in the island camps, where thousands subsist in unsafe and unsanitary conditions, facing extreme weather in summer and winter, along with endemic gang violence, fires and other hazards.

“Being a mother myself, I cannot even imagine the kind of despair that a pregnant woman and mother must have faced to do this,” Eva Cossé, Greece researcher at Human Rights Watch, told VICE World News.

She said the trauma of war and having to flee one’s home country was enough to trigger PTSD in migrants, but Europe’s approach to irregular migration – consigning migrants to harsh living conditions, length delays, insecurity and feelings of hopelessness – also contributed to their mental distress.

Pregnant women in the camps faced significant additional risks and challenges, Cossé said. The camp where the latest incident took place was rapidly built on the site of a former military firing range to replace the infamous Moria camp, which burned to the ground in September, making its thousands of desperate residents homeless. Cossé said she had spoken to heavily-pregnant women in Moria who described “sleeping in overcrowded tents on ground lined only with thin mats or blankets, struggling to reach toilets over rough terrain, and being returned to these conditions within days of caesarean births.”

Dimitra Kalogeropoulou, Greece director for the International Rescue Committee (IRC), told VICE World News that the situation on the islands meant it was “no surprise that people are struggling with their mental health.”

“The IRC has warned time and time again of the mental health crisis that has emerged in the camps,” she said. “People living in the hotspots are trapped there largely due to EU asylum policies that amount to cruel policies of containment.”

The situation only worsened with the imposition of a strict lockdown imposed over the camps last year due to the pandemic; IRC found that self-harm increased by two-thirds among camp residents after the restrictions were imposed.

She said the incident highlighted that the urgent need for EU states to scale up relocation of the most vulnerable people out of the camps to the European mainland “to prevent more desperate people taking matters into their own hands as we’ve seen this week.”

Alessandra Saibene, field coordinator for Doctors Without Borders, said that while the woman was not one of her organisation’s patients, the reports of her situation were “absolutely disturbing.”

“This is just another tragic incident that shows how vulnerable people in such camps are, how desperate their situation is and how unacceptable the policy of containment is.”