AA / Athens / Magda Panoutsopoulou
Human Rights Watch on Thursday accused Greek authorities of double standards in welcoming Ukrainian refugees while rejecting Afghans and other irregular migrants at the Turkish border.
In a 29-page report, the rights body says Greek forces detained, stripped and stole the personal effects of irregular migrants from Afghanistan and the Middle East before sending them back. Turkish.
“There is no denying that the Greek government is responsible for illegal pushbacks at its borders, and using intermediaries to carry out these illegal acts does not absolve it of all responsibility,” said Bill Frelick, Director of Rights of Refugees and Migrants from Human Rights Watch.
The organization also criticized the Minister for Migration, Notis Mitarachi, who said that the Ukrainian refugees were “real refugees”.
“While Greece welcomes Ukrainians as ‘true refugees’, it is cruelly pushing back Afghans and others fleeing similar war and violence,” Frelick said.
“This double standard flouts the so-called shared European values of equality, rule of law and human dignity,” he added.
Interviews conducted by HRW with 26 Afghans show that 23 of them were turned back at Greece’s borders between September 2021 and February 2022.
23 men, two women and a child confirmed that following their arrest they were held with little or no food or drink before being deported to Turkey.
Sixteen migrants interviewed confirmed that the men who escorted them back to the Turkish border spoke the Arabic language and wore black or commando-style uniforms, with balaclavas to cover their faces.
“Three people interviewed were able to talk to the men escorting the boats. The captains of the boats told them (that they) were also migrants employed by the Greek police, with the promise of receiving documents allowing them to continue their journey “, said HRW.
“We do this job for three months, then they give us…a document. With this document we can move freely in Greece and then we can get a ticket to another country,” one reportedly explained. boat captains to one of the migrants interviewed by the human rights organization.
According to the report, the captain is of Pakistani nationality.
HRW urged Greece to immediately end all illegal deportations from Greek territory and to stop using third-country nationals to carry out such deportations.
The organization adds that the European Commission, Greece’s main source of financial aid for migration control, should demand that Athens end all “summary pushbacks and collective expulsions” of asylum seekers to Turkey.
And to call for “pressure on the (Greek) authorities to set up an independent and effective border monitoring mechanism that would investigate allegations of border violence, in order to ensure that no funding (of the EU) does not contribute to violations of fundamental rights and Community law”.
*Translated from English by Mourad Belhaj
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