The human tide Hope floats ... a boat carrying Tunisian migrants enters the Italian port of Lampedusa. Refugees fleeing war and repression in Africa, Asia and the Middle East are flooding into economically depressed southern Europe, where they are being met with an increasingly harsh reception. The journey from one torment to another ends here, in a damp basement lit by a single faint globe. The boy has fallen asleep on a threadbare couch, exhausted after a long day scavenging in garbage bins. His sisters sit silently as their parents talk. There is no food, no money, no hope. Most refugees have a terrible struggle to survive ... Many are drowning or suffocating in trucks trying to get from Greece to other parts of Europe. "What will become of my children?" says Rayhana Nouri, cradling her head in her hands. We came so far and suffered so much to give them a better life. But now there is no future for us, or for them. God, what will happen to us? Athens-based Afghan refugee Rayhana Nouri with her husband Mohammed Ali and daughters Mariam (at left) and Mohadesa. Photo: Mark Baker It is almost a decade since Rayhana's family fled the war in Afghanistan. After spending time in Iran and Turkey, they reached Greece nearly seven years ago. Afraid of being detained or deported, they have never registered with Greek authorities. Like hundreds of thousands of other asylum seekers, they subsist in a twilight zone on the margins of the failing Greek economy. The last of their savings went to the smugglers who brought them by boat from Turkey, their youngest daughter almost drowning after falling overboard during the voyage. Shortly before they left for Greece, their eldest son disappeared. "He went out one day and never came back," says Rayhana, tears welling in her eyes. Now they are stuck, unable to go home and unable to pay their way to try to reach another part of Europe where they might have a chance to rebuild their lives. Sea of despair ... Fishermen look on before laying a wreath in memory of those who drowned after a refugee boat sunk off Lampedusa, Italy, in October last year. When they first arrived in Athens, they slept in a park before sharing a single room with two other families. Now they have this small flat, but not for long. They are seven months behind in their rent and in danger of being evicted. Utility companies are threatening to disconnect them because of hundreds of euros in unpaid bills. They survive on occasional food handouts from non-government charities. "Sometimes my husband and I go to sleep without food so that the children can eat," says Rayhana. Sometimes they do not eat because we have nothing. Each day Rayhana's husband, Mohammad, roams the streets picking through garbage in search of food or scrap metal. He unfolds a small bundle of salvaged copper wire he thinks will fetch about €15 ($23). Now even the scavenging has got harder: poor Greeks are also hunting scrap to try to survive. And the streets are dangerous. Despite a recent government crackdown, mobs of supporters of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party roam Athens, harassing and attacking foreigners. Refugee advocates say the vigilantes have been responsible for the deaths of at least six migrants over the past two years - most of the cases unreported - and hundreds of serious injuries. Greek tragedy ... An Athenian policeman checks a foreigner for ID papers. Recently, Mohammad and 13-year-old daughter Mariam were attacked by three men in a street near their apartment. Mohammad was punched and kicked and Mariam was hit repeatedly in the face and abused for wearing a veil. "Our family has suffered so much," says Rayhana. We left Afghanistan because our life there was destroyed by the war, but this is a second Afghanistan. The more I think about our problems, the crazier I become. I am getting tired of life. I wish I could sleep in peace for just one night. "Please tell the people in your country about us," pleads Rayhana as I leave. No one can hear our voices. Nobody can hear us crying. We are alone in this world. This is where it began - and where it has begun to unravel. In the aftermath of the slaughter of World War II and the mass exodus from Europe it triggered, the world resolved to enshrine universal standards affirming the rights of all mankind to sanctuary and protection from persecution. The Geneva Convention was approved at a special United Nations conference in July 1951. Its definition of a refugee is one of the benchmarks of modern human-rights law: "A person who, owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable ... to return to it." The convention compels the 145 ratifying nations to assist those who reach their territory claiming to be refugees and to not forcibly return those found to be refugees "to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened." Under international law, even nations that are not signatories to the convention are compelled not to allow such forcible return, or refoulement. In 2012, two million people applied for asylum around the world and 1.36 million were formally recognised as refugees. But more than 60 years after the world stood up in defence of the defenceless in Geneva, those noble principles are routinely flouted on the continent that gave them birth: on the shores of the Mediterranean, on the land borders between East and West, and in the suburbs of some of the richest cities on earth. Australia - or at least some of its population - thinks it has a problem with asylum seekers, and particularly with the kind who turn up uninvited by boat. Europe is Australia's reality check. In 2012, 16,261 asylum seekers arrived in Australia by boat. Last year there were about 20,000 arrivals. That is roughly half the number of asylum seekers who land in Europe, mostly by boat, every month. Over the past decade, more than 300,000 a year have reached Europe and about 35,000 more are now arriving every month. Last year, the 28 European Union member states received two-thirds of asylum applications lodged in the 44 major industrialised nations; Australia received 3 per cent. In June last year, the European Union legislated to introduce the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), a uniform set of procedures and standards for the management of asylum seekers that each of the 28 EU member states must adopt as national law within two years. Key objectives of CEAS are to establish high standards of protection across Europe and to ensure that asylum cases are treated equally and result in the same outcome, regardless of the country in which an application is lodged. But a recent report prepared by a coalition of leading refugee advocacy groups, including the European Council on Refugees and Exiles, found that, despite the elaborate new legal framework, these objectives remained "a theoretical concept, in particular for the men, women and children seeking international protection in the EU." The report warned that restrictive visa policies, sanctions against airlines and shipping companies carrying asylum-risk passengers and the lack of legal channels for people to come to the EU for protection were forcing both migrants and refugees into the hands of smugglers - "often at risk of being subjected to serious human rights violations and at times putting their lives in great danger." Central to the European asylum system is a rule that migrants can only seek refugee status in the country in which they first arrived in Europe. If they travel to another EU country and apply for asylum, they will be sent back to the first country - a system enforced with the help of an elaborate, Europe-wide fingerprint database. As a result, most asylum seekers find it much harder to gain sanctuary in the wealthier and generally more refugee-friendly countries of northern Europe, while the burden of managing and supporting the arrivals is falling heavily on the southern border states - particularly Greece, Italy, Spain and Malta, countries already under economic strain. "What the system has done is create a hard shell with a squishy centre," says Australian lawyer Mark Provera, whose recent PhD thesis examined migration law in Europe and Australia. It has placed frontier states of the EU as not only largely responsible for maintaining the EU external borders, but also for determining asylum applications and for providing material needs to asylum seekers. This has had very serious consequences for asylum seekers and member states. The pressure on the frontier states has been compounded by the EU's woeful record in sharing the burden of refugees among its members and with the rest of the world. Of the 80,000 refugees resettled globally each year, the vast majority end up in the US, Canada and Australia. Despite the establishment in 2012 of a new European Resettlement Program, all 28 EU states combined still accept fewer than half the 20,000 refugees Australia committed to take last year. Critics say Europe's asylum policies are designed primarily for deterrence, while politicians and commentators increasingly seek to portray those seeking to resettle in Europe as economic migrants rather than refugees. By making it much harder to reach the richer countries and keeping most new arrivals in the frontier states, often in grim detention camps, the unwritten objective is to dissuade people from coming and to persuade more of those who have come to go home. The inevitable consequence is that vast numbers of genuine refugees are being denied their right to sanctuary and humane treatment. And thousands are dying attempting to straddle the obstacles being stacked on their way. It has been described as the biggest disaster in the Mediterranean since World War II. On October 3 last year, a 20-metre boat, crammed with more than 500 people, mostly Eritreans, sank less than a kilometre from the shore of the Italian island of Lampedusa, midway between Sicily and Tunisia. At least 366 people drowned, many of them children. Poppo Noto, one of the first rescue workers to reach the scene, was overcome: "This was dramatic and tragic in every way. There were so many children among the victims, horrible. They had new shoes, signs of hope. It really is devastating. The venerable Milanese daily Corriere della Sera headlined the news, "Immigrant Slaughter, Italy in Mourning." But while Italians might have been shocked, no one in the Italian government could have been surprised. This was a disaster in waiting, one made worse by the long-standing efforts of Italian authorities to block asylum-seeker boats. One of the 155 survivors, 18-year-old Hamid Mohammad, told CNN that an Italian naval vessel had spotted them in trouble off the coast, but did nothing. "The Italian boat started circling around us," he said. They circled our boat twice, then just went away. That's when people started to panic. The boat's captain had then told passengers, who had been at sea for 13 days, to start a fire to attract attention. He gathered some clothes and bed sheets and lit them. But his container of benzene exploded. When the fire spread, many of the people crowded to one side and the boat capsized and sank with many trapped inside. Another survivor, 30-year-old Germani Nagassi, said: "For five hours we were floating, using the dead bodies of our companions. There is nothing worse than this. There were many children. There was a mother with her four children, a mother with an infant, all lost at sea. Just days before the sinking, the European Parliament's committee on migration had issued a draft report warning that Italy, despite its experience during the Arab Spring - when more than 62,000 asylum seekers flooded into the country - was not ready for a new wave of migration from Syria and North Africa. "Italy has unfortunately shown itself, once again, ill prepared for what appears to be a new surge of mixed migration flows, and appears to have learnt few, if any, lessons from its experiences in 2011," the report scolded. Member states of the Council of Europe are called upon, without exception, to meet their obligations of rescue at sea and to establish clear rules of engagement to ensure that those who are rescued at sea can seek asylum. Migrant support agencies reckon that, since 1988, more than 10,000 asylum seekers have drowned while trying to reach Europe - 1000 of them people attempting to reach Lampedusa. Italy, Spain, Greece and Malta have all been accused by European courts or migrant advocates of actively seeking to block asylum boat arrivals or to push back boats in defiance of European and international law - policies that have contributed to the mounting toll of drownings. In 2007, the European Court of Justice condemned Italy for cutting a deal with Libya to repatriate thousands of Somalis and Eritreans before their asylum claims could be determined. The Italians are believed to have also struck a secret deal with Tunisian authorities to facilitate regular boat pushbacks. In late August 2011, Amnesty International accused the Italians of intercepting a boat 55 kilometres off Lampedusa, off loading more than 100 of the asylum seekers onto an Italian naval ship before transferring them to Tunisian vessels that carried them back to Tunisia. A week after the 2013 Lampedusa disaster, another 31 people drowned when a boat carrying about 250 asylum seekers - most of them Syrians - capsized near Malta. "We are just building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea," despaired Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat. But Malta has also been under attack for its toughening stance on asylum seekers. The island nation, which has the highest population density within the EU, has been swamped by tens of thousands of asylum seekers from North Africa over the past 20 years. When Muscat warned that his country could no longer cope and might be forced to turn boats away, he drew a stern rebuke from EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Malmström: "However tough the situation gets, push-backs are illegal and contrary to the principle of non-refoulement. Access to the asylum procedure must be guaranteed. If the economic crisis that has brought the country to its knees was not enough, Greece has become the unwilling frontline in Europe's struggle with the inexorable tide of humanity pressing at its borders. The civil war in Syria has sharpened that focus over the past two years. The International Organisation for Migration estimates there may be more than a million irregular migrants in Greece. The country's failure to cope and to live up to its legal and humanitarian obligations to asylum seekers has sharpened tensions with the rest of Europe, already strained by the bailouts required to save the Greek economy from collapse. In January 2011, the European Court of Human Rights held that conditions for refugees in Greece were so bad that not only was Greece in breach of European laws but Belgium had also acted illegally by repatriating an Afghan asylum seeker to Athens. The decision effectively has expelled Greece from CEAS. A key element in the ruling that sending migrants back to Greece represented inhumane and degrading treatment was the state of Greek detention camps, where about 20,000 migrants are being held, some reported to be living 20 to a room in squalid conditions. "Some of the camps are terrible," says Martin Baldwin-Edwards, a senior researcher with the Vienna-based International Centre for Migration Policy Development, who has lived in Greece for 15 years. There are persistent complaints about crowding, hygiene, lack of exercise, lack of food and clean water, and there's no respect for religious rights. Baldwin-Edwards says the Greek economic crisis - with unemployment nudging 30 per cent and two-thirds of young Greeks out of work - is feeding resentment towards migrants, and the racist attacks by Golden Dawn supporters. There is no economy in the developed world since the Great Depression that has gone through this sort of collapse. Families and communities are being strained to the limit. I don't know how much longer it can continue without some massive explosion. For the hundreds of thousands of migrants living outside detention, the threat of racist violence compounds the misery of attempting to survive without jobs or welfare support. "Most people have a terrible struggle to survive," says Ana Fontal, a spokeswoman for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles. Nobody trusts the system, so everybody is trying to go somewhere else. They is no legal way, so they have to use the same means they used to get to Europe - smugglers. Many are drowning or suffocating in trucks trying to get from Greece to other parts of Europe. In an attempt to staunch the flow of asylum seekers via Turkey, Greece has built a 13-kilometre border fence and deployed 1800 extra guards to seal the overland route. The move has simply diverted the migrants through the Greek islands, where hundreds are believed to have drowned in the past year. Greece has also sought to quarantine its obligations by making it almost impossible for irregular migrants to apply for asylum. Until last year, asylum applications were accepted at just one police station in Athens, and then for just a few hours on Saturdays. In 2012, fewer than 300 Syrians applied for asylum in Greece, but more than 8000 were arrested for irregular entry in the daily police swoops on migrant communities in Athens. Under pressure from Brussels, Greece has moved to improve its compliance with migration law. Earlier this year it established new departments to manage arrivals and process new asylum applications. Panagiotis Nikas, director of the new First Reception Service, says Greece is being unfairly burdened with a problem that really belongs to the rest of Europe. "We are in the front line of all these migration flows, but these people don't want to stay in Greece, especially nowadays," he says. There are no jobs. There is no money. We are dealing with someone else's problem, but nobody in Europe wants to share this problem. And he warns that unless the civil war in Syria ends soon, it could become the catalyst for a new refugee tide that might eclipse the fallout from the Balkans crisis in the 1990s. Since the conflict erupted in April 2011, more than 50,000 Syrians have applied for asylum in Europe. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has envisioned a worst-case scenario in which as many as three millions Syrians could flood into Europe. Nasim Nayoul was 16 when he fled Syria last year, soon after both his parents disappeared. Now he is in hiding in Berlin, moving from house to house among Syrian exiles as lawyers fight moves to deport him. His passage from one of the world's most dangerous places to one of the most affluent took the teenager by boat, car and foot through eight different countries over more than two months. Nasim was born in al-Safirah, a township near the city of Aleppo in northern Syria that is home to one of the country's biggest chemical weapons facilities and has seen some of the heaviest fighting of the two-year civil war. Before he fled, government soldiers tried to conscript him to fight against the rebels. "The military people tried to force me to fight on their side, but I didn't want to," he says. I was very afraid, especially after I lost my parents. I thought the people from the military would kill me for refusing to fight. Nasim looks down and seems close to tears when asked what happened to his parents. I don't know where they are or what happened to them. They just disappeared. After fleeing to Lebanon from Syria, he travelled to Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, where he paid smugglers $US7000 ($7800) given to him by relatives to take him to Italy. The voyage was long and frightening. The boat was very crowded and we had nothing to eat or drink for many hours, so I was very happy when we finally arrived in Italy. After being intercepted by police in Rome, he set off to hitchhike to Germany. I took a lot of different cars and crossed several countries. I was afraid that the police would get me and send me back home or back to Rome. I had heard from other refugees that you will be sent back to Italy if you get caught on the way to northern Europe. Germany has been one of the most generous countries in Europe towards asylum seekers, recently agreeing to resettle an extra 5000 Syrians from refugee camps in Lebanon. But Nasim's case shows the boundaries of that generosity as Germany falls in with the provisions of Europe's common asylum policies. The day after he arrived, Nasim went to an immigration office in Berlin, where he was immediately arrested and imprisoned. When a fingerprint check confirmed that Italy had been his first arrival point within the EU, authorities began moves to send him back to Rome. "I was always afraid that I would be arrested and tortured in Syria - that's why I left," he says. Then I arrived in Germany, where I thought I would be safe. The one thing I was so afraid of happened to me here. I was full of fear. After lawyers took up his case, Nasim was released from immigration detention and given shelter by other Syrians living in Berlin. When the lawyers challenged his deportation on grounds he was a minor and his rights and safety could not be guaranteed in Italy, German officials rejected the claim despite medical tests confirming his age. When a court ruled he should not be deported, officials appealed the decision. The appeal court is yet to deliver its decision. Despite the many setbacks, Nasim still hopes for a new life in Germany. I wish I could to go to school and study. I hope my future can be here in Germany. I know I can never go home. Mark Baker travelled to Europe with support from the European Commission. Like Good Weekend on Facebook to get regular updates on upcoming stories and events.