Greece’s asylum removals bypass safeguards

At a European border, the first official act matters. A name is taken. A claim can be made. A lawyer can challenge removal. These are not favours granted by a generous state; they are rights under EU law, the European Convention on Human Rights and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

But rights need a file to attach to. If a person is pushed back before anyone records who they are, the law is left speaking to an empty space.

Greece’s National Commission for Human Rights has documented 21 alleged informal forced-return incidents involving at least 359 asylum seekers and refugees in a report by its Recording Mechanism (in.gr). The allegation is blunt: uniformed and non-uniformed actors removed people without identifying them, examining their claims or allowing a court to review what was happening.

Why Frontline Practices Travel

The EU asylum system rests on a bargain that Ireland knows well from other corners of EU law: trust first, scrutiny later. Under the rules, responsibility normally falls on the frontline member state where a person first arrives. Greece is one of those states.

That only works if access to asylum in Greece is dependable. If it is not, the legal assumption beneath the system starts to crack. Courts in destination countries can refuse to send people back, and what looks like a border practice in the Aegean becomes a problem for the whole EU asylum architecture.

The European Ombudsman, the EU’s independent complaints watchdog, has already found that the EU Agency for Asylum failed to pass pushback reports on to the European Commission while working in Greece (European Ombudsman). That finding does not prove each allegation. It does show that even with EU agencies on the ground, the chain from border incident to Brussels oversight can fail.

Germany shows how the problem travels. German courts have generally upheld returns to Greece under EU asylum-responsibility rules, but administrative courts have been more cautious in cases involving women, because of risks of exploitation and sexual violence (taz). Courts need facts before they can decide whether a return is lawful. The EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency, which monitors rights compliance, has made exactly that point (FRA). The Council of Europe’s human-rights commissioner has also called for risk checks, independent monitoring and judicial control before any external processing centres proceed (Berliner Zeitung).

Where Courts Drew the Line

Spain provides the clearest contrast. Its Supreme Court recently ruled that immediate border rejection cannot be used against people intercepted at sea or swimming towards Ceuta and Melilla, Spain’s two enclaves on the North African coast. The full procedure must apply: identification, legal assistance, an interpreter and a protection assessment that can be reviewed (rtve.es, europapress.es).

Italy’s attempt to screen asylum claims outside its own territory, by processing migrants in Albania while keeping them under Italian legal responsibility, has run into the same wall. Italian judges declined to validate detention at the Albanian facility and suspended accelerated border procedures (Amnesty Piemonte/VdA, Sky TG24). In both Spain and Italy, courts pulled border-control experiments back into ordinary legal procedure.

The Greek case points to a more difficult failure. Where a removal is undocumented and completed before registration, a court may have nothing to reconstruct. Spain’s ruling forces a border act into procedure. The Greek allegations describe removals that avoid procedure altogether.

The Registration Gap

The EU’s Migration and Asylum Pact, the bloc’s new asylum rulebook now being put into practice, promises common screening, registration and independent monitoring at external borders. That is the machinery Brussels says will bring order and accountability.

The Greek rights body’s findings describe something that allegedly happens before the machinery starts. The Pact’s safeguards begin once a person is registered. The vulnerable moment is just before that, when there may be no name, no file and no trace.

The European Commission has the power to open infringement proceedings under Article 258 TFEU, its mechanism for forcing member states to comply with EU law. If the alleged pattern is substantiated, registration becomes the Pact’s first real enforcement test. The Commission now has to answer whether Greece’s case warrants formal investigation, or whether it will continue to leave the gap untested.