An unaccompanied 15-year-old Afghan boy was “forced” on to an inflatable raft by Greek authorities, abandoned and left to “drift at sea”, the European Court of Human Rights heard this week.
Dr Niamh Keady-Tabbal from the Irish Centre for Human Rights, who was representing the teenage boy in his case against the Greek state, told the court in Strasbourg how the Greek authorities expelled an unaccompanied minor in a “life-threatening manner” using the “well-documented practice of the Hellenic Coast Guard known as ‘drift-backs’.“
Tuesday’s hearing, which also included the testimony from a woman asylum seeker who says she was forced on to a raft on the Evros river, was the first time the practice of Greek pushbacks appeared before the human rights court.
Ms Keady-Tabbal cited the “extensive reporting” of these pushbacks which often result in asylum seekers being “arbitrarily detained and robbed of their belongings, then taken out to sea and abandoned in rafts”.
The teenage boy, known as GRJ, travelled from Turkey to the Greek island of Samos, arriving on September 8th, 2020. The boy, who was also represented by Dutch human rights lawyer Flip Schuller, made “his intention to apply for asylum unequivocally clear to the Greek authorities”, said Ms Keady-Tabbal. Officials knew he was an unaccompanied minor, she added.
Instead of ensuring he could apply for asylum, Greek officials “escorted the applicant and his companion out of the camp” to the coast guard vessel, “confiscated” his mobile phone and money and “handcuffed the two boys together”, she told the court. These handcuffs were later removed before the boys were forced back on to a “motorless, non-navigable raft”, she said. The Greek authorities “sailed away, abandoning the boys to drift at sea, deliberately endangering their lives”.
Ms Keady-Tabbal accused the Greek government of “completely misrepresenting” how the young man ended up on the raft as part of a “pattern of denial and concealment of systematic pushbacks in the Aegean”. The facts of the Afghan boy’s case were based on “detailed testimonies and corroborated with GPS locations and reliable photographic evidence”.
Greek government senior adviser Dimitrios Kalogiros told Tuesday’s hearing the details presented in the GRJ case were “not credible” and that electronic material submitted as evidence “lacks probative value and therefore no safe conclusion can be drawn in favour of the applicants’ allegations that they were removed back from Greece to Turkiye as a result of actions by state officials”.
Greek senior adviser Stavroula Trekli also told the court the applicants had “not been subjected by the Greek authorities of refoulement to Turkey”.
The young man, who is now 19 and has refugee status in Germany, chose to take legal action so that others would not face the same ordeal he endured upon arrival in Europe, Ms Keady-Tabbal told The Irish Times following Tuesday’s hearing. The practice of “drift-backs” and maritime pushbacks are still being reported in the Aegean Sea, she said.
“It was particularly egregious that children were taken out of a refugee camp where they had sought safety and that authorities would deliberately put them in a life-endangering situation at sea,” she said.
Ms Keady-Tabbal warned that border violence faced by asylum seekers would continue when the EU migration pact, which Ireland has opted into, comes into effect in 2026. She said the pact is presented as a solution to the “so-called crisis on EU borders” but actually paves the way “for human rights abuses like those documented in Greece and across the EU’s external borders to continue”.
“EU policymakers have tried to say that human rights commitments can go hand in hand with tightened border control. In reality this is not the case. When the policies are focused on tightening border control and keeping asylum seekers out, border violence will only continue.”
The case of GRJ is “not an isolated incident but part of a systematic policy” and should highlight the dangers of an EU migration policy that “prioritises border securitisation over protecting human beings”.
The European Court of Human Rights’ ruling on the GRJ v. Greece case is expected to be made in the coming months.
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