Residence permit for exceptional reasons

Pursuant to Article 19 of Law 4251/2014, those foreigners residing in Greece for the last seven consecutive years can request from the competent Directorate of Foreigners and Immigration an initial residence permit for exceptional reasons.

This category of residence permit is a big headache both for the service that receives the requests, as it has to manage a huge volume of requests without having enough staff, and for foreign immigrants who often wait more than a year to receive the coveted date.

These problems, of course, became even more acute as part of the government’s measures to prevent the spread of Covid-19, with the result that all scheduled appointments were canceled and foreign citizens were denied access to the service for almost a year.

He tried to rectify this situation from January 19, 2021 announcement of the Secretary General of Immigration Policy according to which the directorates of foreigners and immigration had to take the necessary measures to determine appointments of foreign citizens who wanted to be legalized with the provisions of the above law.

However, although according to the announcement of the foreigners and immigration directorates, the interested parties would receive answers regarding the appointment within two weeks, this in practice became impossible with the result of appointments requested from the first day of operation (21/01/2021) not yet identified.

This situation is sought to be rectified by the electronic submission of requests for exceptional reasons which you expect to begin in the near future.

Therefore, those who consider that you have the conditions to apply for a residence permit in this category, prepare your files or contact your legal counsel.

The clients of our office do not need to take any action as we will respond immediately to any change in the way requests are submitted to the competent service.

For more information you can contact our office from Monday to Friday 11:00 to 19:00 by phone 00 2103008939 or send us a personal message inbox