Aegean ‘driftbacks’: Abduction, abandonment, and endangerment

In 2020, during the first months of the Covid pandemic, the Greek authorities’ ‘pushback’ tactics begun including the weaponisation of rescue equipment to perform violent and illegal expulsions: Greek officials would forcibly expel migrants intercepted at sea, or apprehended on Greek islands, from Greek territory by abandoning them at sea in inflatable, non-navigable rescue rafts. This practice has since 2020 become a systematic policy, which Forensic Architecture has termed ‘driftbacks’. Driftbacks are carried out alongside other, longstanding and well-documented forms of maritime ‘pushbacks’ and border violence in the Aegean Sea.

There are currently at least 32 applications pending before the European Court of Human Rights seeking to challenge the practice of ‘driftbacks’, which we argue is a form of torture that exposes migrants to refoulement and grave risks to their life. G.R.J. v Greece is one of the only cases brought by an unaccompanied minor, who was abducted and expelled from a refugee camp in Samos without paper trail or means of recourse. A.A.H. and H.J. v Greece was filed on behalf of two Guinean brothers who were abandoned on a raft at night after arriving on Lesvos. The cases seek reparative truth for the active efforts by the Greek authorities to conceal ‘driftbacks’—with a broader view to challenge the EU’s funding of and assistance to these operations, including through the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex.