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F.A.A. v Greece: Illegal expulsions and enforced disappearance at Evros

“I felt like I didn’t exist, that I was nothing.”

“I want them to know about what happened at the borders with the refugees and immigrants. I want them to know about what the commandos do to them and how they treat them.”

FADY, The Intercept

Filed in November 2020, and registered and communicated to Greece in November 2021, this is the first submission to the Human Rights Committee regarding Greece’s systemic policy of collective and summary expulsion of racialised persons at Evros. In 2016, 21-year-old Fady was living in Germany with refugee status when his 11-year-old brother fled Syria to escape ISIS and seek international protection, and disappeared while crossing the Evros River into Greece. When Fady flew to Greece to look for his missing brother, he was racially profiled and abducted by Greek police who illicitly seized his German residency and refugee documents and placed him in incommunicado detention without any official record or paper trail. Greek border forces and commandos in balaclavas forcibly transported him and others in a dinghy across the Evros River, in the presence of German-speaking Frontex officers. Following this ‘pushback’, Fady experienced cardiac arrest, leading to heart surgery and prolonged treatment.

Fady spent an entire year reattempting reentry into Greece, after being denied assistance by the German authorities, who refused to reissue his German identification documents and thereby also denied his recognition and protection by law. Despite holding German residency and EU refugee status, Fady was effectively rendered undocumented for nearly three years, during which he experienced multiple expulsions from Greece (while reattempting reentry 14 times) and was repeatedly exposed to deportation to Syria. His brother remains missing to this day.

FAA v Greece is the first case brought before the UN Human Rights Committee about the racialising state violence of collective summary expulsions, or ‘pushbacks’, from Greece. This is one of a few cases pending before the Committee on ‘pushbacks’ at Europe’s borders. It is the second case, after that brought against Croatia (represented by the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights), to argue that the racist state violence of borders is a form of enforced disappearance.

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Valentina Azarova
Amanda Danson Brown
Anan Abu Shanab

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Case documents

Redacted complaint

Third Party Intervention submitted by Border Violence Monitoring Network

Related submissions

Comments on the Committee on Enforced Disappearances draft General Comment 1 on Enforced Disappearances in the Context of Migration, submitted by de:border and Legal Centre Lesvos on 15 June 2023

Initial Comments in View of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances’ Elaboration of a New General Comment on Enforced Disappearances in the Migration Context, submitted by de:border on 20 June 2022

Border Violence Monitoring Network, Info from Civil Society Organizations for Greece’s reporting to the UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances, March 2022

Noemi Magugliani, Niamh Keady-Tabbal, Róisín Dunbar and Amanda Brown, ‘Submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants’ report on pushback practices and their impact on the human rights of migrants’ (2021)






Last updated
May 2024