04 December 2019
A new report by Mobile Info Team.
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On 15th of November Mobile Info Team published its first report about illegal pushbacks at the Greek-Turkish border. In several newsletters we have already informed you about our efforts to document and collect human rights violations at the Greek border, especially about so called pushbacks to Turkey. These pushbacks are very problematic on a lot of different levels: asylum seekers are denied their human right to apply for asylum, as well as the possibility to receive protection in Europe.
Instead, the people we interviewed have often been beaten, important documents and phones got stolen or destroyed and they got returned to Turkey, without any individual assessment what consequences a return to Turkey can have for them. This was potentially life threatening to some respondents, because they had been further pushed back to the countries they initially had been fleeing from, like Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan.
We are very proud to share with you, that our report was widely noticed. European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), Safe Passage, Pro Asyl, Border Violence Monitoring Network, Equal Rights without Borders or the Advocacy Director for Europe and Central Asia from Human Rights Watch shared our report, to just name a few of them. We hope very much that our report will contribute to further establish that there are systematic efforts at the Greek-Turkish border to illegally pushback asylum seekers and that this one day will lead to an end of this inhuman and life threatening practice.
Source: Mobile Info Team (link)
Full report available here: Illegal pushbacks at the border: denying refugees the right to claim asylum (link)
And here: Illegal pushbacks in Evros: evidence of human rights abuses at the Greece/Turkey border (pdf)
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