A teenage girl in a Greek migrant camp was nearly stoned to death after refusing a forced marriage, according to a senior government minister who described the episode as one of the most disturbing cases she encountered during the migrant crisis.
Eirini Agapidaki said the incident took place in 2019 inside the overcrowded Moria refugee camp on the island of Lesbos, at a time when the facility had spiraled into what she called “absolute chaos.”
“I honestly don’t want to talk about what I saw and what I found there, because they are very, very ugly things,” Agapidaki said in a televised interview. “They expose the country.”
Describing the conditions inside Moria, she added, “Moria was completely out of control… an endless chaos… absolute chaos. All sorts of things were happening there — drug trafficking… criminal activity.”
Agapidaki said the teenage girl had effectively been sold into marriage before the situation escalated.
“A mother had agreed to marry off her 15-year-old daughter to someone there,” she said. “And because the girl resisted, the community organized a stoning.”
When pressed on who was responsible, she added that it was “her relatives,” claiming the girl had been “essentially sold to someone else.”
“There were 40-year-olds in facilities for unaccompanied minors, drug trafficking, and the relatives of a 15-year-old girl organized her stoning because she resisted a forced marriage.”
Greek minister Eirini Agapidaki recalls the horrors that unfolded at the Moria migrant… pic.twitter.com/Pp1qC76e0M
— Remix News & Views (@RMXnews) April 28, 2026
The minister said she only learned of the case later, after the girl had been removed from the camp and transferred to a shelter for unaccompanied minors.
“They told me she was doing very well at school, and we were very happy, given what she had gone through,” she said.
Agapidaki, who was tasked at the time with overseeing the protection of vulnerable minors under Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ administration, said the episode reflected the broader breakdown of order inside the camp during the peak of Europe’s migrant influx.
“There were also cases that amounted essentially to human trafficking,” she said. “These children rarely manage to survive. They fall into the hands of trafficking networks.”
Originally built to house around 3,000 people, Moria became a symbol of the migrant crisis after its population grew to many times that number, with thousands of minors among those living in increasingly dangerous conditions.
However, many illegal migrants were found to be abusing the system, with Agapidaki noting, “I found 40-year-olds in facilities for unaccompanied minors,” adding that young children were also living in extreme conditions “and we didn’t even know they were there.”
She said reforms introduced in the years that followed brought the system under control, reducing the number of unaccompanied minors and improving oversight.
“From that chaos, we built a system,” she said.
The Moria camp was later destroyed by fire in 2020. In recent months, the Greek government has sought to crack down on asylum entries.
In July last year, Mitsotakis announced the suspension of asylum application processing for migrants arriving in Greece by sea from North Africa, declaring that Greece would take strict legal measures to prevent further arrivals.
“This is a necessary temporary response, based precisely on the same legal reasoning that the Greek government successfully invoked when dealing with the migration invasion of March 2020. Those migrants who enter the country illegally will be arrested and detained,” he said at the time.
In October, the government announced sweeping cuts to asylum-related spending and the phasing out of rent subsidies for refugees, redirecting funds toward work programs and Greek-language training.
The Ministry of Migration and Asylum confirmed that total funding for asylum benefits will drop by almost 30 percent, from €400 million to €288 million per year.
Migration Minister Thanos Plevris said the reforms mark a fundamental shift in policy. “Those granted asylum in the future will no longer live on permanent subsidies, but will be integrated into society through work,” he said, adding that support payments will cover “only the absolute necessities.”
Despite Agapidaki’s suggestion that a new system was put in place to bring stability to the issue of unaccompanied minors, in November last year, Migration and Asylum Minister Thanos Plevris announced that more than half of asylum seekers who claimed to be minors under Greece’s new verification system had been found to be adults.
Out of 104 cases reviewed since the new procedures began in late August, 59 individuals were determined to be over 18. “The repercussions for those who filed a false statement are self-evident,” Plevris said.
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