January 2025 – present: Mapping Border Fatalities
Border violence appears through direct violence at sea, but also through the conditions created by the criminalisation of migration itself – when people are forced into hiding, pushed towards increasingly dangerous routes, or prevented from accessing safety and support out of fear of detention, deportation, or pushbacks. These forms of violence often remain less visible, yet continue to have deadly consequences. Documenting these deaths and disappearances remains essential to making these realities visible and to remembering the lives lost behind them. Since January 2025, the Legal Centre has been documenting and Mapping Border Fatalities at Greece’s sea borders.
March 2023: FIRE IN MORIA REFUGEE CAMP
In September 2020, Moria refugee camp was destroyed in fires that burned over several days. Six Afghan teenager known as the “Moria 6” were arrested and later convicted of arson for Moria’s destruction despite the lack of credible evidence against them. Commissioned by the lawyers representing the Moria 6 (including the LCL), Forensic Architecture/Forensis produced a comprehensive report and video about the circumstances of the Moria fires, including a spatio-temporal reconstruction of the spreading of the fires.
January 2023: Forensic Reconstruction of Massive Pushback Off Coast of Crete, Greece in 2020
In October 2020, the Greek authorities illegally and violently expelled nearly 200 people from Greek territorial waters towards Turkey, ultimately abandoning them on life rafts at sea. The Legal Centre Lesvos commissioned a forensic reconstruction video, produced by an independent forensic research team to support the survivors’ application before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against Greece, S.A.A. and Others v Greece.
August 2022: Drift-backs in Aegean Sea
Spanning a period of two years, from 28 February 2020, when the first drift-back case was reported and documented, to 28 February 2022, this interactive cartographic platform hosts evidence of 1,018 pushbacks in the Aegean Sea, involving 27,464 people.
The Legal Centre Lesvos collaborated with Forensic Architecture and Forensis on this mapping project done Regular updates are being done to the map.