Firstly, HUGE and HEARTFELT thanks for all your support!

Thanks to the generous match funding from the Cameron Foundation (which is included in the total on our page), all donations received before Christmas are doubled and we are very close to having raised £20,000!

Our clinic continues to be particularly busy at the moment. Several of our clients who are applying to be reunited with family members in other European countries have just received refusal decisions. Sadly, this is routine, as European states are being more and more restrictive. We will help our clients challenge these decisions, and we know from experience that sometimes it takes a long time until an application succeeds and the family is brought together again.

You can read about a particularly complex and emotional case on our blog. Our client, a mother from Afghanistan, feared that her young daughter in Belgium would not recognise her anymore. Over 15 months after we started to help the family, they were finally reunited.

This is the difference your support makes. 

We are pleased to announce that from today all donations to the RLS Christmas Appeal will be matched pound for pound.

Yes that’s right! A donation of £25 will become £50, and a donation of £100 will become £200!

Every donation you make will now go twice as far towards helping us continue our vital work.

We’d like to thank the John Cameron Foundation for its generosity in making this possible. The Foundation supports a range of charities primarily in the areas of human rights, health, education, and disaster relief. 

They have chosen to support RLS because responding to the current refugee crisis is a cause that is particularly close to their heart.

All donations up to £6,000 will be matched.

Thank you all for your donations to date, which have allowed us to give free legal support to upwards of 50 refugees and their families over the last two months in our legal clinic in Athens. We are enormously grateful for your support.

In this time alone we have helped to reunite several refugee families from Afghanistan, Somalia and Turkey. In many cases they had been separated for years. The support we have given our clients has been essential to achieving these successful outcomes. We advocate on our client’s behalf with the Greek authorities, gather all the evidence needed to present their cases, and ensure they understand the complex legal rules and procedures they are caught up in. This would not have been possible without your help.

We are now fundraising for a stretch target of £30,000 in order to send out more volunteer lawyers to continue our work in the first quarter of 2019. These funds are urgently needed.

We already have several UK lawyers ready to give up their time to volunteer at our clinic in early 2019.

As winter sets in, our clients in Greece are facing even tougher conditions, as many, including unaccompanied children, sleep in parks and squats.

Thousands more refugees are expected to arrive in Athens over the coming weeks as the Greek government transfers people out from overcrowded camps on the islands where the living conditions are dire. Please help us ensure that refugees in Athens are aware of their rights, able to articulate their asylum claims, and ensure that their right to family reunion is respected.