30/06: 10 people at Turkish/Greek land border – pushed back to Turkey!

01.07.2018 / 11:44 / Greek-Turkish Land Border

Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 30th of June 2018

Case name: 2018_06_30-AEG401
Situation: Distress situation at Evros land border
Status of WTM Investigation: Open
Place of Incident: Evros Region

Summary of the Case: On Saturday, the 30th of June 2018, at 4.30am, the Alarm Phone was informed by a contact person about a group of people at the Turkish-Greek land border, in need of support. We were told that the communication between the contact person and the travellers had broken down, but we received a list of their names. Five of them were from Syria, five from Sierra Leone, six men, two women, and two children. We contacted the travellers, received their GPS position, and notified the police to their whereabouts, as the travellers had asked us to do. We also informed the UNHCR Greece. At 6.44am we received the information that one of the children had a liver problem and suffered a lot due to the cold. Afterwards we lost contact to the travellers. At 8.56am, the regional police station informed us that they had been searching for 2 hours but had not been able to find them.

At 1.45pm we received a message from the contact person that had initially alerted us to the case. He said that the Greek officers had beaten the travellers and stolen their phones. Apparently, they had been forced onto a boat and returned to the Turkish side, across the Evros river. We tried to contact the UNHCR but were unable to reach them. We were able to contact one of the members of the group of travellers at 2.18pm, who had been able to hide her phone. She told us that they were on their way back to Istanbul. They had been beaten up by people in blue and black uniforms at about 9am local time. Their belongings had been taken away, and at least 5 of them had been forced back to Turkey by boat. They had not taken any pictures as their phones had been taken away. They were kept in confinement in Greece for about one hour and treated badly, “like dogs” she said, before being forced onto a boat that returned them illegally to Turkey. At 3.20pm, she confirmed to us that those who had attacked and pushed them back had been Greek authorities. At 4.05pm, she told us that she was now on a bus and would arrive in Istanbul in the evening. In a short statement we denounced this serious violation of the group's basic human rights and demanded immediate actions to stop these illegal push back practices at the Turkish-Greek border.

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    While the exact location of patrols is of course constantly changing, this line indicates the approximate boundary routinely patrolled by border guards’ naval assets. In the open sea, it usually correspond to the outer extent of the contiguous zone, the area in which “State may exercise the control necessary to prevent infringement of its customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws” (UNCLOS, art. 33). Data source: interviews with border police officials.
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    Approximate radar beam range covered by coastal radars operating in the frame of national marine traffic monitoring systems. The actual beam depends from several different parameters (including the type of object to be detected). Data source: Finmeccanica.
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    Maritime area beyond and adjacent to the territorial sea in which the coastal state exercises sovereign rights for the purposes of exploring and exploiting, conserving and managing the natural resources, whether living or non-living, the seabed and its subsoil and the superjacent waters. Its breadth is 200 nautical miles from the straight baselines from which the territorial sea is measured (UNCLOS, Arts. 55, 56 and 57). Data source: Juan Luis Suárez de Vivero, Atlas of the European Seas and Oceans
  • Frontex operations
     
    Frontex has, in the past few years, carried out several sea operations at the maritime borders of the EU. The blue shapes indicate the approximate extend of these operations. Data source: Migreurop Altas.
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    Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) network coverage. Data source: Collins Mobile Coverage.
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    Oil and gas platforms in the Mediterranean. Data source:
  • Search and Rescue Zone
     
    An area of defined dimensions within which a given state is has the responsibility to co-ordinate Search and Rescue operations, i.e. the search for, and provision of aid to, persons, ships or other craft which are, or are feared to be, in distress or imminent danger. Data source: IMO availability of search and rescue (SAR) services - SAR.8/Circ.3, 17 June 2011.
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