A Small Guide On Hypocrisy And Denial
This Summer, to illustrate another nightmare faced by migrants crossing borders, we would like to talk about Greece’s pushback policy. To do so, we will delve into a rare public hearing that recently took place before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg regarding two pushback cases filed against Greece.
On 4 June 2024, the Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights heard two cases – A.E. v. Greece and G.R.J. v. Greece – both related to pushback accusations against Greece, and brought by lawyers from the Greek Council of Refugees and Prakken d’Oliveira, respectively. We had the chance to attend this public hearing in Strasbourg, which was a special event, as it is an exceptionally rare occasion to see the Greek government having to publicly present its position on pushbacks and violence at Greece’s borders in front of a court, let alone an international one.
Unsurprisingly, the hearing ended up being another opportunity for Greece to reiterate its blanket denial and attempt to conceal its long standing practice of systematic pushbacks at the Greek-Turkish border.
Not seen, not caught: Greece’s representatives essentially argued before the European Court that there is no convincing evidence proving that these pushbacks happened – or at least not at the hands of Greek authorities. The full recording of this public hearing is available here.
Before going into some of the absurd claims presented during the hearing, let us first have a closer look at the two cases addressed before the Court on 4 June.
A.E. is a Turkish citizen who, after being imprisoned for over two years, fled persecution in her country of origin and entered Greece across the Evros river in 2019 to seek protection. Upon arrival in Greece, instead of being registered as an asylum seeker, she was arrested by Greek authorities, detained incommunicado and then forced onto a rubber raft and pushed back to Turkey across the Evros River. Following her pushback, she was re-arrested in Turkey and held in solitary confinement in a high security prison for another two years.
G.R.J. is an Afghan citizen who was under 18 and travelling without his family when he arrived on Samos island in 2020. After reaching the refugee camp of Vathy, he presented himself to the relevant authorities in order to seek international protection together with another minor. Instead of being registered as asylum seekers, the next day they were forcibly taken onto a Coast Guard vessel by Greek officials, then forced onto a motorless raft and abandoned in the middle of the Aegean Sea. A photo by the Turkish Coast Guard shows the two boys paddling in the sea with their hands before being rescued.
These two cases are not isolated incidents but part of a government policy. Already, 32 applications filed at the European Court related to recent pushbacks by Greek authorities passed an important procedural step in December 2021 (including two cases brought by the LCL). While June’s public hearing was filled with a plethora of dishonest assertions of facts on the part of Greece, we would like to focus only on a small selection of claims and tactics presented during the hearing.
Here is a small guide on ‘How to (try to) get away with pushbacks’:
- First, invent a delusional reality of borders for asylum seekers.
Greece’s representatives claimed during the hearing, that “third country nationals can easily enter and exit Greece, especially at the area of the Evros river” before adding that “the morphology of that area, Greece’s northern borders of Türkiye, facilitates that practice. We are referring to approximately 200 km of border line, of which only a limited part is covered by a wall”. It further claimed that “migrants illegally enter other parts of the Greek territory without addressing the authorities in their transit journey to other European countries”.
Apart from being factually incorrect, this depiction of Greece’s borders – easy to cross and travel through for migrants – is particularly surprising coming from the very representatives of the nominated and self-proclaimed ‘shield’ of EU borders. Equally surprising is the fact that to support this invented theory of easy border crossings, Greece’s representatives believed it useful to refer to the “numerous” emergency petitions filed against its own government in order to prevent the illegal pushbacks of migrants at the Evros border. In most of these cases, the Court ordered Greece to ensure that groups of migrants could apply for international protection. However, instead of doing that, in multiple instances, Greece pushed those groups back to Turkey and informed the Court it was unable to locate the people. If anything, these cases are proof that Greece’s border is in fact particularly dangerous and that the violent enforcement of these borders create an immediate risk of irreparable harm for those who manage to cross to seek asylum. Further these cases demonstrate that Greece does not respect the orders of the European Court.
- Second, keep on denying, without bothering to prove your innocence.
Faced with a large amount of credible and corroborated evidence presented by the survivors in both cases, Greece’s representatives made all possible efforts to discredit their testimonies and question the authenticity of the photographs, videos and geolocalisations presented. At no moment in time, however, did they provide any alternative version of what happened to the survivors, nor did they bother to try to prove that their officials were not involved in the violations suffered.
The government’s sole explanation is that if the survivors had reached the Greek territory in the two cases at stake, there is no evidence that they were ever in contact with the Greek authorities. In a particularly distasteful insinuation, and without referring to any specific cases, it also generally declared that “people that die while attempting to cross Evros due to natural causes, for example heart failure, are presented as victims that were shot or beaten by Greek officials”. For reference, nearly 800 people died or disappeared along the Eastern Mediterranean route in 2023 alone, including the Evros region. Here comes a simple interrogation: does the Government consider that people frozen to death “with little clothing in a freezing field” or a person shot dead at the border have died of “natural causes”? The latter will hopefully be clarified in the case of Muhammad v. Greece, brought by HIAS Greece and Equal Rights Beyond Borders and currently pending in front of the European Court of Human Rights.
This posture of the Greek Government is nothing short of a tactic to evade its own obligation to submit evidence proving that their officials are not the perpetrators of these specific pushbacks – which they completely failed to meet.
- Third, create the illusion of ongoing investigations and effective remedies against pushbacks, but in actuality do nothing.
Throughout the hearing, the Government’s representatives repeatedly referred to “investigations that the NTA [National Transparency Authority] has conducted into complaints about human rights violations of third country nationals”, while presenting the NTA as an “independent authority”. As rightly highlighted by the legal representatives of the survivors, however, this entity – meant to act as the national border monitoring mechanism – does not meet the criteria of an independent and impartial authority according to the Greek Constitution, nor the requirements of UN institutions or the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions for monitoring mechanisms. Above all, it does not have the required expertise to conduct investigations into border violence. With this in mind, the NTA’s conclusions can not be considered convincing evidence, especially since they are mainly based on data and testimonies from officials of the Greek authorities themselves, and no directly affected persons were questioned.
This hearing was also the occasion to recall that there are no effective and accessible remedies under Greek law to investigate pushback cases: as shown by the absence of any decisions rendered by a Greek court on a pushback case. All cases regarding pushbacks brought before the Greek justice are archived at the preliminary investigation stage, and no case has been brought to trial, just as in the case of Ms. A.E. whose claim in Greek court was rejected, inter alia, on the grounds that the Greek police never conduct pushbacks.
What remains after this hearing is: pushbacks are illegal. The upcoming judgements in these cases are a chance for the Court to finally recognize them as such and to increase the pressure on the Greek government to stop what has become a normalised practice on the Greek-Turkey border. We hope it will not go wasted.
More information about some of the other cases of pushbacks represented by the Legal Centre Lesvos can be found here on our website.