359 Removals Bypass Asylum Safeguards

A person stopped at Greece’s border is not meant to disappear into an administrative blank. EU law, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights give that person the right to give their name, ask for asylum, and challenge removal before a court. The mechanism is simple enough: registration first, decision after. If removal happens before a name is written down, those rights remain rights only in theory.

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 report alleges that uniformed and non-uniformed actors removed people without identification, without screening protection claims, and without any chance of legal review.

Why Frontline Practices Travel

Under EU asylum rules, responsibility usually falls on the frontline state where a person first enters the bloc. Greece is one of those states. That principle matters even in Malta, because the whole system rests on trust that border states will register people properly and examine claims according to law.

When that trust weakens, the consequences travel. Courts in other member states can block transfers back to Greece if they are not satisfied that people will be treated lawfully there. A rule designed to allocate responsibility then starts to fail from within, because the paperwork assumes a functioning process that may not have happened at the border.

The European Ombudsman, the EU’s independent complaints watchdog, has already found that the EU Agency for Asylum failed to forward pushback reports from Greece to the European Commission (European Ombudsman). That does not prove every allegation. It does show that even when an EU agency is present on the ground, the reporting line to Brussels can break.

Germany shows how quickly this becomes a European problem. German courts have generally upheld returns to Greece under EU asylum-responsibility rules, but administrative courts have been more careful in cases involving women, because of risks of exploitation and sexual violence (taz). Courts need facts before deciding whether a return is lawful, which is exactly the point stressed by the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency, the body that monitors rights compliance (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 are allowed to operate (Berliner Zeitung).

Where Courts Drew the Line

Spain offers the clearest legal contrast. The Spanish Supreme Court recently ruled that immediate border rejection cannot apply to 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 has run into the same legal boundary with its plan to process asylum claims in Albania while keeping migrants under Italian legal responsibility. 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 procedures that can be challenged.

Greece points to the more difficult problem. If removal is undocumented and completed before registration, a court later has little to reconstruct. Spain’s ruling forces the border act into legal procedure. The Greek allegations describe removals that avoid the 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. For Malta, which has long argued that frontline pressure needs European rules rather than ad hoc burden-shifting, that framework is supposed to bring order to a politically charged system.

But the Greek rights body’s findings describe alleged removals before the system records anyone. The Pact’s safeguards begin once a person is registered. The vulnerable point is the moment just before that, when a person can still be treated as if they were never there.

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