A little over a year ago, The New York Times published a video investigation that showed incontrovertible evidence of asylum seekers – including children – being loaded into a white van by masked men on the Greek island of Lesvos, transferred to a Greek Coast Guard ship, and then abandoned in the middle of the sea in an inflatable raft.
After drifting for hours, the group was rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard. Journalists from the Times tracked them down to a Turkish immigration detention centre. One of the victims, 27-year-old Naima Hassan Aden, from Somalia, said, “We didn’t expect to survive on that day.”
Aden had been clutching her six-month-old child in her arms during the ordeal.
The victims said the masked men who kidnapped them had posed as workers from Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). The Greek Coast Guard ship they were forced onto was largely funded by the EU.
The findings of the video investigation were shocking. But for anyone who has been paying attention to Greek and EU migration policies in the Aegean Sea, they did not come as a surprise. The fact that Greek authorities systematically push asylum and migrants back to Türkiye has been an open secret for years.
What the Times investigation did was finally remove the veil of plausible deniability that the Greek government – and EU authorities – have hidden behind for years to avoid being held accountable for carrying out these pushbacks, which are illegal under international law.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive body, called for Greece to conduct an independent inquiry into the expulsion of asylum seekers from the country. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told CNN he was taking “this incident very seriously” and had ordered an investigation, before defending Greece’s migration policies.
In October 2023, I interviewed Hans Leijtens, the director of Frontex, the European border agency. Under the previous director, Fabrice Leggeri, Frontex has been accused of being complicit in Greece’s pushbacks, eventually leading to Leggeri’s resignation.
Since taking the helm, Leijtens has faced the daunting task of reorganising the agency and improving practices related to the protection of fundamental rights while balancing the interests of EU member states. Regarding the Times video, Leijtens said it provided “hard evidence”, and expressed his belief that it would compel Greece to “step out of the cycle of violations”.
Nearly a year after the publication of the Times investigation, I went to Lesvos to see what – if anything – had changed.
Documenting pushbacks
This trip to Lesvos was not the first time I went to Greece to investigate what was happening with pushbacks. In 2021, I spent four months living on the island of Samos, where I attended boat landings to document the arrivals of asylum seekers and migrants for a website called Aegean Boat Report.
The website has been monitoring the situation in the Aegean Sea for seven years in the hope that it would protect people from being pushed back to Türkiye, and to provide proof that these violations are actually taking place. Over that time, it says nearly 84,000 people have been pushed back to Türkiye.
On Samos, the places where boats arrived weren’t easily accessible. They were usually close to rocky mountains along the coast where there are dense trees and no pathways. The people arriving hoped the terrain would make it more difficult for authorities to find them and send them back to Türkiye.
I would spend my days searching these areas. Sometimes, I would search for hours and not see anyone. Others, I would find people still wet from the crossing, visibly exhausted and traumatised. I will never forget seeing mothers breastfeeding their newborns among the branches while hiding from Greek authorities.
Most of the time, I would lose contact with people shortly after I met them – presumably because authorities would take their phones away before pushing them back to Türkiye. Occasionally, however, people would share a live location with me, confirming they had been sent back.
Implausible deniability
Sending people back to countries where they might face human rights abuses, persecution, or violence is a violation of the non-refoulement principle in international law.
To maintain the veil of plausibility around pushbacks – which are a form of non-refoulement – Greece has taken to intimidating and slapping legal cases on aid workers, volunteers, and even journalists who expose the practice. Greek authorities, for example, recently issued an arrest warrant for Tommy Olsen, the head of Aegean Boat Report.
"The authorities are really trying to silence these aid workers so they can continue their pushback practices unimpeded," Tineke Strik, a member of the European Parliament, told me in an interview late last year, warning that Greece is increasingly backsliding when it comes to upholding the rule of law.
MSF is the only NGO still allowed to visit the places where boats carrying asylum seekers and migrants arrive on the Greek islands. MSF project coordinator on Lesvos Filip Marijnissen, who I spoke to during my time on the island, said that, before the Times investigation, he would regularly see masked individuals – like the ones depicted in the Times investigation – lurking around these locations. “They left quickly once we arrived,” he said. After the investigation came out, Marijnissen added, the sightings have become much less frequent.
Alice Kleinschmidt lives near a refugee landing point on Lesvos and has worked for various NGOs helping refugees and asylum seekers on the island over the years. She said that, before the Times investigation, she often saw vans without licence plates quickly leaving the area after a boat's arrival. Now, it still happens, but it has become more rare.
Refugees have told Kleinschmidt stories about people posing as joggers, tourists, and doctors to deceive asylum seekers and migrants arriving on the island. “They [would] say, ‘Trust us, stay here,’ and then people are robbed and kidnapped,” she recounted.
Public relations show
About a month after the publication of the Times investigation, a fishing trawler called the Adriana, which was carrying an estimated 750 asylum seekers and migrants, capsized in Greek waters after setting sail from Libya. Only 104 people survived. Eighty-two bodies were recovered. Over 500 people remain missing and are presumed dead.
According to a digital investigation and survivors’ accounts, a Greek Coast Guard boat attached a rope to the Adriana and attempted to tow it out of Greek waters, causing it to capsize.
Under the spotlight from the Times’ investigation and the shipwreck, the Greek Coast Guard began regularly posting videos on its website publicising rescue operations of ships carrying asylum seekers and migrants.
For Olsen, this was a transparent attempt to try to salvage the agency’s reputation, but it didn’t reflect what was actually happening.
According to his monitoring, while boats close to the Greek islands were being rescued, many others were still being pushed back. “Those claiming otherwise [have] been misled by a well-staged PR campaign and an intense wish for things to finally improve,” he wrote in November last year. “I’m sorry to say but you have been lied to.”
The shift in pushback patterns did result in an increase in the number of people arriving on the Greek islands in July, August, and September last year compared to averages for those months since May 2020 – when pushbacks became Greece’s de facto border policy.
But by the end of October, the number of arrivals had fallen again and have remained low this year, although they are still slightly higher than those from 2020 to 2022.
Shifting trends
On Lesvos, I met with humanitarian aid workers and lawyers who spoke of a new pattern: The Greek Coast Guard has increased patrols near the islands where people arrive most frequently, causing new migration routes to emerge.
Since March 2024, smaller islands – like Ikaria, Fournoi, Patmos, Leipsoi, Nisyros, Tilos, Pserimos, and Kalimnos – have been seeing more arrivals, the people I spoke to said.
According to Lorraine Leete, coordinator of the Legal Centre Lesvos, this poses a problem because there are fewer NGOs to provide medical care or monitor violations on these islands, and there are no legal groups to offer support. “Violence against new arrivals is usually higher on these islands, and illegal deportations continue to occur,” Leete explained.
There have also been developments in Türkiye that may be contributing to the reduction in asylum seekers and migrants crossing the Aegean.
Leete, from the Legal Centre Lesvos, said that in March this year she started to hear stories from asylum seekers and migrants whose family members had been pushed back to Türkiye. Their relatives, they said, had been sent to detention centres near the eastern border with Iran and were then pushed out of the country. These new reports emerged amid diplomatic efforts to ease the tense relationship between Türkiye and Greece and increase cooperation on key topics, including migration.
Aegean Boat Report has received messages from asylum seekers and migrants – particularly Afghans – saying they had been sent to camps near Türkiye’s eastern border. Some of them have been pushed back from Greece, while others were rounded up in Turkish cities.
Ashraf, a 25-year-old Afghan I met on Lesvos who asked that only his first name be used, confirmed this trend. He arrived on the island earlier this year with his sister and mother. The family decided to flee, he said, after the Taliban forced his sister into marriage and sought to conscript him into the military. His father, he added, had been killed by the group years earlier.
After arriving in Lesvos, Ashraf and his mother and sister were chased by authorities. Ashraf managed to escape, but his sister and mother were caught and pushed back to Türkiye. When I spoke to him in May, he said that the last time he heard from them, his mother and sister said they were being sent to the border with Iran – but that had been three months earlier.
“There is clearly something going on,” said Marijnissen, from MSF, adding that he’s heard similar stories from patients. “They say the Turkish authorities bring them back, put them in vans, and take them to the Iranian border where they are placed in a camp on the Iranian side or transported elsewhere.”
The cycle continues
In the year since the Times investigation and Ariana shipwreck, evidence of wrongdoing by the Greek Coast Guard has continued to mount. On 17 June, the BBC published a documentary investigation – which I contributed to – finding that at least 43 people died between May 2020 and 2023 due to Greek pushback operations. Nine of the victims were deliberately thrown into the water.
On 19 June, a Greek news outlet reported that a disciplinary investigation by the coast guard into the incident in the Times investigation silently wrapped up months ago without any action being taken. Although the Greek National Transparency Authority is still investigating the incident, the activist who filmed the video the Times’ investigation was based on, Fayad Mulla, has little hope for the eventual outcome. “The authority is known for incompetence and slowness. They've been investigating for a year what is already obvious,” he said.
Mulla is unsurprised that the video he filmed and the Times investigation have failed to force Greece to change its practices. “These crimes have been happening for years, and anyone who wants to know, knows it,” he told me at the end of June. “My video has only added pressure, like so many other revelations.”
But if overwhelming evidence isn’t enough to move the needle, what else is needed to force Greece to end this cycle of violations?
Olsen believes what Frontex does or doesn’t do may be the key. The agency continues to fund and support the Greek Coast Guard, despite being fully aware of what is happening. “As long as Frontex covers for the Greek authorities, it doesn't matter how much evidence there is,” he said.
Edited by Eric Reidy.
