One and a half years ago, Josoor began operating in Turkey. Since then, we have seen thousands of people unlawfully and brutally returned from Greece and Bulgaria, across the EU’s external land and sea borders. We have supported the survivors of these illegal pushbacks, joined the Border Violence Monitoring Network and contributed numerous reports to our joint testimony database and conducted advocacy work. With all these efforts, we expose border violence in an effort to end it. We might not reach that goal anytime soon. But at the very least, we know that by documenting and reporting about it, nobody will be able to say they did not know, and the perpetrators can someday be held accountable. 

In these 18 months, the situation has continually worsened. Pushbacks have increased in numbers and brutality. While these developments are extremely worrying, we have seen some successes on the political side. Watchdog organisations like ours, journalists and investigative groups have successfully raised the alarm about pushbacks to the general public. On national and EU levels, courts and agencies have launched investigations.

This time last year, the Greek government and Frontex - the most prominent perpetrators of pushbacks - were busy eagerly dismissing all reports about illegal practices. As a result of mounting international pressure, they have recently moved from dismissal to defending what they call “interceptions”, “readmissions” or “returns” and attempt to make use of legal loopholes.

In line with this development, the Greek migration minister Notis Mitarachi published a video recently. His statement marks another step towards a potential legalisation of pushbacks and justification of crass international law violations. This blog post aims to deconstruct Mitarachis’ argument and expose (some of) the logical fallacies and untruths to show why these developments are so very dangerous. For this purpose, each point of the minister's statement will be addressed in chronological order.

Schrödingers Pushbacks 

Mitarachi claims Greece has “every right to protect its borders”, simultaneously stating that allegations about pushbacks are “absolutely unfounded”.

With this defense strategy, pushbacks are acknowledged, admitted and justified. Their “success”, a stark reduction in arrival numbers, are laid out with pride. Simultaneously however, the allegations are deemed unfounded and dismissed as Turkish fake news. 

I don’t recall who on Twitter so aptly named it “Schrödingers pushback”, but no other term is more fitting. 

Do pushbacks happen if nobody is watching? Do pushbacks happen if some of those watching have ulterior motives, such as the Turkish Coastguard? Do pushbacks happen if those documenting them are discredited, criminalised, defamed and vilified by the perpetrators? Do pushbacks happen if the bodies of the people who disappear are never found?

Of course they do. After years of dismissal and defamation of the evidence: do we still have to entertain the perpetrators' ridiculous claim that pushbacks are not occurring? While they themselves have already moved on to justifying them? Or can we just acknowledge the reality and move on to the facts?

Regulation 656/2014

Mitarachi claims that “Greece has every right to intercept these crossings in accordance with EU regulation 656/2014”. The EU regulation establishing rules for the surveillance of the EU’s external sea borders is frequently cited by the perpetrators in an attempt to defend themselves via legal loopholes. A highly selective interpretation of some of its articles might allow for the justification of pushbacks. Yet individual paragraphs cited for that purpose cannot be taken out of context of both the regulation as a whole and the wider framework of European and international law. The fact remains that the practice of pushbacks breaches numerous articles of the regulation (including articles 4, 9 and 10).  The perpetrators seem to be aware of this, hence why they maintain the argument of “unfounded allegations” - as Mitarachis does - and continue with the discreditation of both reports and reporters.

Even the former Fundamental Rights Officer of Frontex last year addressed the interpretation of the regulation used by Mitarachi now, illustrating some of the reasons why this misinterpretation of the regulation cannot be used as a permission for pushbacks.  Mitarachis and other officials from both the Greek government and Frontex itself continue to blatantly disregard this evaluation. Leaving out the discussion around regulation 656/2014 regarding interceptions at sea, they further keep ignoring all evidence of pushbacks at the land borders.

All these points only concern the question of whether the practice itself is legally justifiable. The violence, inhumane and degrading treatment as well as unlawful detention and other grave fundamental rights violations inherent to systematic pushbacks are not even addressed yet.

Torture and other inhuman elements of pushbacks

Tens of thousands of people have been robbed of their rights on our borders in recent years. Thousands of testimonies detail the gruesome human rights violations, torture convention violations, child rights violations, sexual violence, and much more. 

Every day, Josoor’s teams at the Greek-Turkish borders meet people returned from Greece (semi-) naked, beaten, injured, and humiliated. Every single pushback case is shocking, but the true extent of these systematic fundamental rights violations at the hands of the EU border regime becomes clear when analysing aggregate data. 

Together with our partner organisations from the Border Violence Monitoring Network, we have collected first hand testimonies recounting the experience of 4600 people only on the Greece-Turkey border in 2020. 89% of testimonies contained one or more forms of violence that amounts to torture or inhuman treatment. 52% of the groups subjected to torture contained children and minors. Almost half of all pushback groups were forced to undress, sometimes pushed back completely naked. All land and many sea pushbacks include arbitrary detention. Greek officers pinned down and cut open the hands of people, tied them to bars of detention cells or threw them into the Evros river with their hands zip tied. More and more people are disappearing during pushbacks, many carried away by the current of the Evros river.

In the fall of 2020, Greek authorities began using small islands in the Evros river to abandon groups in the river. Large numbers of people, including children, are stranded for days, with authorities on both sides preventing them from crossing the river.

Greek officials dismiss all this evidence and no real investigations have been launched.

The smuggling networks argument

“Greece does not want to be a gateway to the EU for smuggling networks” states Mitarachis, and that's perfectly understandable. The fact remains however that EU agencies and member states are legally obliged to ensure international protection for those who need and request it on our territories. 

Citing criminal smuggling when confronted with allegations of fundamental rights violations is a dangerous straw man argument. It is also one of the most hypocritical parts of EU deterrence policies: since policy changes in the early 2000s, all pathways for regular entry with the purpose of seeking international protection have been disabled. 

Yes, desperate people pay criminals who exploit and abuse them. But they have no other option. Nobody would get on a dinghy if they could take a plane. Nobody would pay thousands of euros to cross the sea if they could buy a ferry ticket. Nobody would risk their lives in an attempt to save them if the situation in their countries of origin and our legislation wouldn’t force them to. The only way to apply for asylum is irregular entry - as explained here. 

Policies based on the goal of disrupting smuggling networks either lack basic understanding or basic logic. They are either willfully or unintentionally ignorant. They completely neglect the fact that people are not leaving because smugglers tell them to, but because they have to. As long as the legal framework does not enable regular ways to apply for asylum, smuggling networks will continue to thrive. Any politician and government who focuses its “migration policies” on smuggling networks simply has no answers for the questions they are promising to solve.

The notion of Turkey as a safe country 

“Turkey is a safe country and can provide where needed appropriate international protection” states Mitarachi in his video. 

Turkey is a country in which the Geneva Conventions only apply to Europeans. Yes, there are some other forms of international protection, but they are far from appropriate and do not suffice to declare Turkey safe for refugees from non- European countries. 

In addition, a question that always comes up when people talk about Turkey in this context: how can you on the one hand paint Turkey as a lawless, unscrupulous, reckless regime while simultaneously declaring it a safe third country?

Mitarachi also states that Turkey is not preventing crossings and is hinting at the Turkish authorities’ instrumentalisation of footage to put pressure on Greece. Both of these claims are correct. What he does not discuss but should be added here is that Turkey not only instrumentalises pushback footage but also uses people in need of protection as political leverage, e.g. in March 2020. Turkey also conducts pushbacks on its Eastern and Southern borders, abuses and deports asylum seekers. All of that is appalling, unethical and illegal, and should be condemned in any case. It also makes it clear that Turkey is not safe - which we have discussed here.

These fundamental rights violations at the hands of Turkish authorities however in no way legitimise the actions of Greece and the EU as a whole, accusing Turkey of these wrongdoings while they are themselves engaging in systematic fundamental rights violations on a daily basis. The same EU by the way that pays countries including Turkey to do the dirty work necessary for the implementation of the European deterrence regime.

Irrational policies and the dire cost of the EU’s deterrence regime

Systematic violations of fundamental rights and utter disregard for human lives on both sides of the border are the direct result of the EUs policies, or lack thereof.

“It is important that all EU states and the EU commission as well as Frontex and EASO all work together to address the migration crisis” says Mitarachis. Underlying the failure of the EU to do so is precisely the misunderstanding of migration that he is expressing by his use of the term ‘crisis’. Yes, the EU has to step up and jointly work out feasible policies addressing migration. But the naive notion that we find ourselves in an exceptional, temporary situation and the resulting “zero arrivals” objective disable all realistic possibilities to do so. All attempts based on this notion have been doomed to fail and backfire in dangerous ways, both for people on the move and the EU itself, as the “EU- Turkey deal” precedent and recent events with Belarus and Morocco show.

Ironically, these fear based, racist, populist politics promising easy solutions have taken all realistic solutions off the table. A whole continent is now confronted with its incapability to address the simple fact that humans are migrating. 

As long as this reality is not acknowledged, Europe will continue failing to respond to the fact that people are migrating in search of safety, security or simply freedom - the lack of many of which we have contributed to - and that many of them have a legal and moral right to do so. 

To add to the irony, these irrational politics built on the fear of a loss of our values, rule of law and democracy have led us to collectively throw all of them out the window ourselves - closely followed by our humanity and our freedom. This collapse of our values, democracy and rule of law is the true crisis we find ourselves in right now - and the spread of 'alternative facts' as in most of Mitarachis' statement is both result and reason for it.

The evidence

Defending and justifying pushbacks, Mitarachis continues to claim that the allegations “are clearly unfounded, rely on footage or testimonials provided from the country of departure”. Apart from the absurdity of justifying something while (falsely) claiming it does not happen, his assertions are simply not true.

Yes, the reports of Turkish authorities and media rightfully should not be taken for the truth. But Turkish authorities also publishing footage does not refute the wealth of evidence from independent sources that Mitarachi and the Greek government refuse to acknowledge. 

Thousands of testimonies, collected independently of Turkish authorities, recount the same experience of brutal, systematic, illegal pushbacks. Dozens of different human rights watchdogs from small ones, like ourselves, to big ones, like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, detail the specifics of pushbacks and evidence grave fundamental rights violations. Tons of visual evidence provided by pushback survivors themselves is scrutinised by investigative groups both within and outside Greece. Bellingcat, Disinfaux Collective, Forensic Architecture, and others verify it all. Media outlets from an incredibly wide spectrum all across the world have reported, verified and investigated these allegations - and found them to be true. Spanning from Der Spiegel to the New Humanitarian, BBC to Wyborcza, Lighthouse Reports to the New York Times, Vice to Taiwan Reporter: they all came to the same conclusion. 

It’s been proven beyond doubt that pushbacks from Greece a) are systematically conducted, b) contain inhuman & degrading treatment amounting to torture, c) do employ arbitrary, unlawful detention and d) are indiscriminate, including (unaccompanied) minors, disabled people, pregnant women, elderly, and ethnic minorities, including persecuted Kurdish Turks.

Conclusion

Whether this change in defense strategy is a last desperate attempt to avoid accountability for the systematic criminal activities of state authorities or the beginning of a successful push to legalise pushbacks remains to be seen.

Apart from the question of whether pushbacks will be legalised one day, many more questions remain. Are we really already at the point where we have to explain why torture, inhuman & degrading treatment and arbitrary detention is NOT in line with EU and international law? Why it is immoral, inhuman and should be stopped immediately? Can we accept the politics of fear leading us to abandoning the values of the EU - the core of the very reason why people seek solace here? And what will the history books write about the Europe of today?