The case of an unaccompanied 15-year-old Afghan boy, who was allegedly forced on to an inflatable raft by Greek authorities and left drift at sea, has been declared inadmissible by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
The Strasbourg court, which issued its unanimous ruling on Tuesday, acknowledged there were “strong indications” to suggest the “systematic practice of ‘pushbacks’ from the Greek islands” to Turkey existed at the time of the alleged events in 2020.
However, the court found the applicant’s statements and allegations were “contradictory and inconsistent at times” and that he failed to provide prima facie evidence that he was in Greece and pushed back from the island of Samos on the alleged dates.
The case, which appeared before the ECHR last June, heard how the teenage boy, identified as GRJ, left his country in 2018 fearing persecution by the Taliban. He secretly entered Iran before travelling to Turkey and then to the Greek island of Samos by inflatable boat, where he said he arrived on September 8th, 2020.
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The court heard the boy expressed his wish to apply for international protection in Greece, but the following day, was forced on to a raft by coastguard officers and left adrift in the Aegean Sea. He was subsequently recovered by the Turkish coastguard. GRJ’s legal representatives said the facts of his case were based on “detailed testimonies and corroborated with GPS locations and reliable photographic evidence”.
Senior advisers to the Greek government responded last June that the details of the GRJ case were “not credible” and that the man had not been subjected to “refoulement” to Turkey by the Greek authorities.
Last June’s hearing, which also included testimony from a Turkish woman who said she was forced on to a raft on the Evros river and back to Turkey in 2019, was the first time the practice of Greek pushbacks appeared before the human rights court. The ECHR found a number of violations in the woman’s case, including a violation of article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which rules no one shall be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment.
Dr Niamh Keady-Tabbal of the Irish Centre for Human Rights, who represented GRJ against the Greek state, described the ruling as “shocking, profoundly unjust, and a devastating blow to justice and accountability”. As the first case of its kind to be heard by the ECHR, it should have “set a precedent for addressing the systematic practice of drift backs that puts asylum seekers’ lives at risk on a near-daily basis”, she said.
The court’s approach in the case “raises critical concerns about the burden of proof in pushback cases, where applicants face nearly insurmountable barriers to gathering evidence” and highlights the “impossible standards of evidence imposed on pushback victims”, Ms Keady-Tabbal told The Irish Times.
“It also signals a dangerous precedent where states can apparently evade accountability through denial, systematic obfuscation and non-investigation.”
The Greek permanent representative at the Council of Europe did not respond to The Irish Times’ request for comment on the ruling.
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