Another group of 50 children is expected to fly from Athens to Germany on Saturday, and 20 more will head to Switzerland at a later date. Greece hopes to relocate some 1,600 unaccompanied minors in the coming months.

At least 5,200 migrant children from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and African countries currently live in Greece, many of them under harsh conditions in camps on islands in the Aegean.

Deputy migration minister Giorgos Koumoutsakos said that although the number of children was small, it sent a strong message for others to follow the example set by Luxembourg.

Greece, he said, is having to bear a disproportionate share of the refugee burden.

“Greece faces a crisis within a crisis; migration and the pandemic together,” he told state broadcaster ERT. “The combination makes an already difficult situation even more so, and more complex”, Reuters reported.

Having imposed a lockdown early on, Greece has weathered the coronavirus pandemic relatively well compared to many other European countries, with 2,170 confirmed cases and 101 deaths to date.

But its economy, which had been emerging from a decade-long recession following a debt crisis, is expected to suffer badly from a collapse in tourism bookings.

Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, called on Greece this week to release all unaccompanied minors, saying their detention in overcrowded camps or in police cells heightened the risk of them contracting COVID-19.

Hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees fleeing conflicts and poverty in their countries used Greece as a springboard toward other European countries in 2015 and 2016 when an EU-brokered accord with Turkey all but halted the flow.

Turkey now hosts about 3.4 million refugees and migrants, while Greece has about 120,000 who are waiting for asylum applications to be processed. Many of them are in overcrowded camps on five islands in the Aegean Sea, where aid groups say living conditions are dire.

About a dozen European nations have expressed a willingness to take in a number of them on a voluntary basis, including Italy, Finland, Serbia, Ireland and Portugal, Greek officials say.

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“Greece wants to build two new closed camps in (the northern region of) Serres and the greater Athens area with 1,000 places,” migration minister, Notis Mitarachi told Skai TV.

“We need the backing of local communities. We cannot leave all (these) people on the islands,” he said, AFP reported.

Mitarachi said the camps would host asylum seekers who arrived after March 1, when Turkey announced it would no longer prevent people from trying to cross into the European Union.

Residents of a Serres town rumored to host one of the camps staged protests earlier this week and local officials declared their opposition to the plan.

Over 1,700 migrants have landed on Lesbos and four other Aegean islands from Turkey over the past week, adding to the 38,000 already crammed into abysmal and overstretched refugee centers.

The new surge has ramped up already high tensions on an island that has been on the migration frontline for years.

Frustration exploded into violence last weekend with mobs setting up roadblocks, attacking cars carrying NGO workers and beating journalists.

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