On the night of October 20, 2020, hooded men attacked a small fishing boat near the Greek island of Crete. The boat had set sail from Turkey a day earlier, bound for Italy, but a storm forced it to approach the Greek coast amid the risk of shipwreck. As soon as they got on board, the attackers beat some of the 190 men and women on the fishing boat. Most were Syrians, accompanied by some Iraqis, some Afghans and four Somali women. There were more than 20 children. They intended to apply for asylum in the European Union. The one who remembers that night of terror is Fedaa A., one of the ship’s occupants.
His story, over the phone from Suwayda, his hometown in Syria, is part of a lawsuit by a dozen victims in the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against Greece over alleged forced repatriation of refugees (illegal deportation without guarantees). Reaching the EU, abuse and abandonment at sea. Athens denies the allegations, according to the documentation to which EL PAÍS had access. For its part, the European Border Guard Agency (Frontex), from which the complainants requested information, did not want to disclose what they might know about the incident.
“I am a legal entity, I do not harm anyone. I can’t understand how they beat me so brutally,” says Fedaa A, a 38-year-old attorney. “We didn’t fight back, we were afraid. They beat us with sticks and they had guns. They wanted to scare us,” he adds of the group who attacked the boat, unidentified men but believed to be accompanied by Greek coast guards, according to the complainants.
Fedaa A. and his wife, a pharmacist, had sold their house to fund the trip to reach the EU, seek asylum and apply for family reunification. The hoods also stole all their money, he says. They slapped another passenger’s wrist and three fingers, forcing an English-speaking passenger to translate a warning to the group: “If you don’t cooperate, we will do the same to you.”
In addition to these men, according to Fedaa A, there were others in Greek Coast Guard uniforms, and the patrol boats on which they took him also bore the Coast Guard logo. It took them several hours to travel more than 300 kilometers to a point between the Greek islands of Rhodes and Symi, which borders Turkish sovereign waters. Then they used life rafts to keep her afloat. “They threw us all, men, women and children, into the inflatable boats as if they had garbage,” recalls Fedaa A. One of the passengers managed to hide his phone and called the emergency number 112. for hours. “We thought we were going to die until a voice answered in Turkish,” he says. They submitted their location and were rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard.
Fedaa A., along with 10 other passengers on this shortened trip, denounced Greece to the European Court of Human Rights. It’s one of dozens of lawsuits filed against the Hellenic Republic over hot returns or collective expulsions, which Frontex has also blasted for alleged inaction in the face of the incidents. But Fedaa A.’s is one of the few that passed the first process to be audited. This newspaper had access to the two files that the court in Strasbourg must examine, including Greece’s response.
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The lawsuit contains documents that attempt to show that Frontex allegedly covered up the facts. The plaintiffs’ lawyers asked for the official documents of the European Border Protection Agency, which only partially complied with the request. They asked Frontex to submit to the court two operational reports from October 20 and 21 relating to the presence of two groups of people in inflatable life rafts, which they believed could match the plaintiffs’ account. A spokeswoman for the organization has confirmed to EL PAÍS that the agency has prepared two documents which it refuses to disclose because “they contain personal data as well as sensitive operational information, the disclosure of which not only violates data protection laws but could jeopardize future activities.” Agency activities .
Passengers on the fishing boat saw a drone or military aircraft circling overhead while still sailing in international waters. They provide video, photos and GPS locations to show they had reached Greek waters. “We were so close to the shore that I could even see the houses,” says Fedaa A. A forensic investigative team proposed by the plaintiffs produced an extensive fact-finding report, concluding that the hot return territorial occurs its waters Greek. In addition, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Acnur) has submitted a 12-page brief to the court in which it lends credence to the allegation and, after a lengthy introduction in which it takes it for granted that the Coast Guard is proceeding systematically despite the The fact that Greece denies this, hot returnees, added the report on what happened on the trip by Fedaa A., according to the report made by another Syrian passenger 10 days after the events at the agency in Turkey.
Deportation of a family in Evros
A second lawsuit, to which Greece responded in Strasbourg, accuses the Athens government of violence against unarmed asylum seekers. It is about the expulsion of a Syrian couple with three children. The father, Hassan T., answers questions for this newspaper from Turkey. Although the lawsuit relates to only one of the hot returnees, he says it was the fourth time his attempt to reach Greece encountered the methods of the Greek security forces. The first three attempts to reach Greece between March and June 2020 were by sea.
When they first reached the island of Chios, they were reportedly brought back in boats by the Coast Guard and floated in life rafts. The second time they were towed back into the sea without touching land, and the third time they thought they had made it by abandoning the boat. “We were very scared on the journey from Turkey, it’s very dangerous,” says Hassan T., and “when we arrived on Lesbos [Grecia] I thought we were safe and we all hugged. The Greek Coast Guard took us to a barracks and then put us on a small boat with a promise to take us to Mytilene. [la capital de la isla]“. But they were left adrift again. Neither the adults nor the children could swim, so they decided not to try the sea again.
On July 9, 2020, they went to the land border between Turkey and Greece, in an area of the Evros River. They crossed it with other families and hid in the vegetation all night, back in Greece. During the day they walked through the forest hoping to reach Athens by bus to apply for asylum there. After five hours of marching, they stopped to rest. So policemen with dogs stopped her and took her to a police station. Before his phone was hijacked, Hassan T. WhatsApped his location to family members and the next day, after his deportation to Turkey, he forwarded the location to the phone of Legal Center Lesvos, an NGO made up of women lawyers involved in the filing were present at the action before the ECtHR.
The lawsuit includes a detailed forensic reconstruction performed by Legal Center Lesvos to conclude that the arrest took place at the Soufli Border Guard and Police Station near the border with Turkey. There they held the group of adults and children for about eight hours, according to Hassan, always. The police beat several of the elderly, he says. And they refused to take milk from a bag for the applicant’s only one-year-old son. At sunset, they were taken to the river in trucks and forced to board a rubber dinghy. Some of the adults were beaten again on the way to the Turkish side as a warning not to return. They had to walk more than 20 kilometers to Edirne, the nearest Turkish city.
The Greek government denies everything in the letters it sent in response to the Strasbourg demands. The actions of the police and coast guard are always in accordance with international law and, insofar as the allegations describe illegal behavior, are “not credible”. In its first letter, sent in June 2022, the Greek executive argues that the plaintiffs accuse Greece of the widespread practice of collective expulsions without evidence. In his last letter from November of the same year he sees the demand for political reasons to question the immigration policy of the conservative government of Kyriakos Mitsotakis.
The EU’s external border protection authority is in the crosshairs of investigations into the passivity or cover-up of forced returns of migrants in the Mediterranean. Does Frontex confirm the existence of hot returnees? “Since it is an ongoing court case, we cannot comment on it,” a spokesman told EL PAÍS.
A report by the European Anti-Fraud Agency (OLAF) published last October confirms serious irregularities in the management of Frontex and claims that senior agency officials were aware of illegal and irregular practices by its staff and some states. Members —like Greece— to prevent irregular entry of migrants. The report analyzes hot returnees on the high seas, who have been particularly denounced since 2020 under the command of Frenchman Fabrice Leggeri at Frontex, who eventually resigned as executive director of the agency. OLAF highlights a dozen cases in which Greek border police forcibly evict small boats with dozens of migrants on board into Turkish waters and “abandon” them to their fate, all in the eyes of Frontex agents. The agency will be headed up this month by Dutchman Hans Leijtens, who expressed concerns about the legality of the operations before the European Parliament.
The only time the ECtHR has ruled Greece over an alleged pushback, it took eight years to reach a verdict. The expulsion from Greece prevented Fedaa A. from applying for asylum in the EU. Trying to be ruined forces him to continue living in an area of Syria where the war is not yet over. Despite this, this lawyer does not lose hope that justice will be done. “I respect European laws and European people, but I think Europe needs to change its asylum system because it’s like an all-or-nothing obstacle course. I lost 15,000 euros and almost died,” he claims, before adding: “Greece destroyed my dreams and those of my children.”
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