As we look back at the last six months in Lesvos, it is difficult not to feel the futility of the words we keep putting to paper, month after month, year after year, documenting the always increasing draconian policies affecting the lives of people on the move and the normalisation of violence and migrant deaths. This is not only at Greece’s border with Turkey in Lesvos, but across the globe. Pundits and politicians espouse blatant and often contradictory lies (with impunity) in order to push their agendas of hate, discrimination and exclusion. Islamophobic, transphobic, and racist views are framed as political positions and normalised within the public discourse around the world.
Greece has been no exception. The Greek Prime Minister has emphatically stated for years that illegal pushbacks of migrants are not happening, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In parallel, the Minister of Migration, Plevris, praises the work of the Hellenic Coast Guard in protecting Greece’s borders and emphasises that it is his aim to punish people on the move. In the last six months he has followed through on these statements with new policies of expanded criminalisation and detention of migrants, and the unlawful and discriminatory suspension of asylum for all those arriving to Greece from the African continent.
Where does the work of human rights defenders fit when the rule of law itself has been trampled? When genocides are carried out on live feed unchecked, and the leader of the world’s most powerful nation openly claims that he is not constrained by international law, but only by his own disreputable morals, further entrenching this feeling of impotence. How many times can we report on the violation of migrant rights in Lesvos? On the degrading and inhuman conditions inherent in government-run camps; on the erosion of the right to seek asylum, on the incessant violent attacks against people on the move by the Hellenic Coast Guard (attacks which, since 2021, we have concluded constitute crimes against humanity due to their widespread and systematic nature)? How many times can we document and write about the erosion of migrant rights before those rights fail to have any meaning at all? For how long will we be counting the dead?
This Situation Report from Lesvos serves as a provisional answer to these questions. In the face of such violence, it is important to name the successes of the past six months. These include the acquittal of several LCL clients who were wrongfully accused; the historic initiation of criminal charges against twenty coast guard officers and commanders in the case of the state crime of Pylos; and, after seven years of uncertainty, the long overdue acquittal of the twenty-four defendants in the “ERCI” case by the court in Lesvos. Even as words feel increasingly hollow in this post-truth era, we also recognise the necessity, at a bare minimum, of creating a historic record not only of these successes but also of the violence we are witnessing: a record for today, and for some time in the future in which we have to believe there will be a reckoning for all the horrors of the present.
In this report you will find updates on:
- The continued construction of the EU funded Vastria detention centre in Lesvos despite continued local opposition;
- Systematic pushbacks and fatal incidents in the Aegean Sea, as EU funds are allocated to increase the capacity of the Hellenic Coast Guard;
- The unlawful and discriminatory suspension of the right to seek asylum over the summer, and politically manufactured crisis in Crete and other islands;
- Greece’s new deportation law with expanded detention powers and punitive measures for undocumented migrants; and finally,
- Some important legal victories, including acquittals in the several LCL clients, and in the long awaiting ERCI case.
You can download or read the full report here:
LCL-Situation-Report-July-December2025