A terrible human cost One EU policy Britain is happy to emulate: forcing back refugees

If you want to see what UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives 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 riding high, having surprised pundits with the scale of his victory over the left in last month’s general election. Mitsotakis has convinced many voters that he is returning Greece to stability – and part of the pitch is his claim to have all but ended refugee boat crossings from Turkey.

At a campaign event on 12 May, Mitsotakis claimed his government had reduced “irregular” arrivals by 90%. The choice of location was significant: he 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 network of “closed” camps to house those who do still arrive, it appears order has been restored.

An investigation by the New York Times points to what that “order” can mean. Footage, shot by an aid worker and verified by the NYT, shows refugees from Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia being taken from Lesbos and abandoned at sea by the Greek authorities. The 12 men, women and children are taken from an unmarked van and forced on to a speedboat. They are then transferred on to a Greek coastguard vessel and taken out into the Aegean, where they are pushed on to an inflatable emergency life raft and left to drift. The group was later rescued and taken to Turkey.

The video appears to show an extreme version of what is known as a pushback: the forcible turning away of migrants at a country’s border. If so, it probably breaks Greek, EU and international law. 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 last week, Mitsotakis called the incident “completely unacceptable” and claimed an investigation had 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.

Migrants who stay in Europe are more likely to find themselves in detention-like conditions, 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 charged with “facilitating illegal immigration” and face years in prison if found guilty. Allegations of mistreatment are often met with official denial and little in the way of sanctions from the EU. 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.)

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.

This is one area in which post-Brexit Britain is happy to emulate its European neighbours. The crackdown on small boat crossings is partly inspired by Greece’s model. The former UK home secretary Priti Patel wanted Border Force officers to carry out “turnback” operations in the Channel and gave them immunity from prosecution for deaths at sea. The illegal migration bill making its way through the UK parliament envisages camps on former military sites. Advocates of these policies say they are necessary to maintain control over migration and that they save lives, by reducing the number of people making journeys. But turning refugees away does not reduce the number of people who need safety, it merely pushes them towards poorer countries, which already host 85% of the world’s displaced people.

In Greece, Médecins Sans Frontières says that, in the past year, 940 refugees it was in contact with have gone missing from Lesbos: 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.

Turning refugees away merely pushes them towards poorer countries