The United Nations Refugee Agency has denounced the “violence, mistreatment and refoulement” that many refugees experience at Europe’s borders.
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“What is happening at European borders is legally and morally unacceptable and must stop”. Ie High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, warned on Monday against “normalization” of the illegal refoulement of migrants at the borders of Europe, Monday 21 February.
He denounced “violence, ill-treatment and repression” inflicted on refugees intercepted at Europe’s borders, both on land and at sea. Illegal returns which have multiplied since the 2015 migration crisis, in particular at the borders of Greece and Croatia, according to a survey by the German magazine “Der Spiegel” in October 2021. The countries of Eastern Europe Europe have also been accused of turning back refugees who entered brutally from Belarus last November.
The High Commissioner for Refugees also highlighted the cases of informal returns observed in Central Europe, or on the border between Greece and Turkey, with nearly 540 incidents of informal returns reported by Greece since the beginning of 2020. It is also the case at sea, where “people say they were left adrift in life rafts or sometimes even forced to jump straight into the water”emphasizes Filippo Grandi. However, many incidents are never reported, and states rarely investigate this information.