If you want to see what Rishi Sunak’s Tories hope to achieve with their “stop the boats” policy – and the brutal reality that underlies it – look to Greece. The country’s rightwing prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, is currently riding high, having surprised pundits with the scale of his victory over the left in Sunday’s general election. Mitsotakis has convinced many voters that he is returning Greece to stability after the turbulence of the 2010s – and part of the pitch is his claim to have all but ended refugee boat crossings from Turkey.
“We proved that the sea has borders, and those borders can and must be guarded,” Mitsotakis declared at a campaign event on 12 May, at which he claimed his government had reduced “irregular” arrivals by 90%. The choice of location was significant: Mitsotakis was speaking amid the ruins of Moria, the chaotic, filthy refugee camp that sprang up on the Aegean island of Lesbos during Europe’s refugee crisis, and which burned down in 2020. Today, with the government building a new network of “closed” camps to house those who do still arrive, it appears order has been restored.
An investigation by the New York Times, published last week, points to what that “order” can mean in practice. Video footage, shot by an aid worker and verified by the NYT, shows a group of refugees from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia being taken from Lesbos and abandoned at sea by the Greek authorities. First, the 12 men, women and children are taken from an unmarked van and forced on to a waiting speedboat. From there, they are transferred on to a Greek coastguard vessel and taken out into the Aegean, where they are pushed on to an inflatable emergency life raft – an easily capsized and unsteerable vessel – and left to drift. The group were later rescued and taken to Turkey.
The video appears to show a particularly extreme version of what is known as a pushback: the forcible turning away of migrants at a country’s border. If so, it likely breaks Greek, EU and international law. Aside from the immediate danger they might put people in, pushbacks violate a fundamental principle of refugee protection, which is that people seeking asylum have the right to a fair hearing. When confronted with the evidence on CNN this week, Mitsotakis called the incident “completely unacceptable” and claimed an investigation had already begun. But it is part of a wider pattern: there have been numerous reports of Greece abandoning refugees at sea, although the evidence has rarely been so stark.
In recent years, countries on the EU’s southern and eastern borders have been taking increasingly harsh measures to deter refugees. Bulgaria and Poland are among other countries accused of violently pushing back people at their borders. Migrants who stay in Europe are more likely to find themselves in detention-like conditions – there are already reports of problems at the new Greek camps – while those who step in to help find themselves harassed by border guards and threatened with prosecution. In Italy, 21 sea rescuers, including crew members of the rescue ship Iuventa, are currently charged with “facilitating illegal immigration” and face years in prison if found guilty.
Allegations of mistreatment are often met with official denial – in 2021, when a Dutch journalist accused Mitsotakis of “lying” about alleged pushbacks, he responded by accusing her of insulting the Greek people – and little sanction from the EU. Indeed, it was alleged last year that the EU’s border agency Frontex had taken part in pushbacks in the Aegean and then covered it up. (The agency denied this.)
The lack of complaint should come as little surprise. Europe has come to see a shared interest in limiting the movement of refugees across its borders, even if that places people in danger and erodes the universal right to asylum. In 2020, in response to a border crisis deliberately stoked by Turkey, the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, described Greece as Europe’s “shield”.
While the EU has until now largely turned a blind eye to reports of wrongdoing at its frontiers, as a bloc it has also found ways to force refugees back to danger while staying just within the bounds of its own human rights laws. In the central Mediterranean, the EU has overseen the return of more than 100,000 migrants to Libya since 2017, where they risk being severely abused, by withdrawing search and rescue and sending coordinates of boats in distress to the Libyan coastguard – a system of pushbacks in all but name.
This is one area in which post-Brexit Britain is happy to emulate its European neighbours. The UK government’s crackdown on small boat crossings is partly inspired by Greece’s model. The former home secretary Priti Patel, who toured Greece’s new “closed” centres for migrants in summer 2021, wanted Border Force officers to carry out “turnback” operations in the Channel and gave them immunity from prosecution for any deaths at sea. The illegal migration bill currently making its way through parliament envisages a network of camps on former military sites, much like the ones the Greek government is building.
Advocates of these policies say they are necessary to maintain a sense of control over migration and that they save lives, by reducing the overall number of people making journeys. The Tories are no doubt looking enviously at Mitsotakis’s vote share: the pushback revelations are unlikely to make a dent in his support when Greeks go back to the polls next month. But turning refugees away does not reduce the number of people who need safety, it merely pushes them towards poorer countries, who already host 85% of the world’s displaced people. That increases the likelihood that some will turn to smugglers or take greater risk to travel, and gives countries further back along the migration routes an incentive to close their borders too.
International refugee law exists for a reason: if people don’t have the right to asylum wherever they need it, we quickly reach a situation in which they can’t find it anywhere. The alternative to the current hardening of borders is for states to run well-funded, fair asylum systems – and to support one another in doing so. That’s not easy to argue for in the current political climate, but a first step is to expose the human cost of our governments’ existing policies.
In Greece, Médecins Sans Frontières says that in the past year, 940 refugees it was in contact with have gone missing from Lesbos alone: the EU must hold the people responsible accountable. In the UK, the Refugee Council estimates that as many as 190,000 people could end up detained or forced into destitution by the illegal migration bill, which does more to undermine asylum than any other law to date.
If you are unhappy with what is going on, now is the time to make a noise about it.
Daniel Trilling is the author of Lights in the Distance: Exile and Refuge at the Borders of Europe
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