CRS/RLL Seminar: Sharp Borders: Technology, Pushbacks, and Interdisciplinary Investigations

great welcome everybody my name is petra molnar i'm the associate director of the refugee law lab and it's my pleasure to welcome you to the sharp borders event um it's a joint event between the refugee law lab and the center for refugee studies and we are a group of scholars and lawyers and journalists and filmmakers trying to interrogate issues at the intersection of migration and technology just a few housekeeping notes before we launch into the discussion today and before i introduce our wonderful speakers um for the audience members if you don't mind just turning off your camera for the um panel portion and then we can all meet together during the q a that would be great and also please write down your questions uh into the chat and i will try and moderate as best as i can during the q a um it's really a wonderful opportunity for us to meet today to discuss a very important topic um one that lies at the intersection of a variety of different contexts that we will hope to explore together and that is the increasing practice of pushbacks for those of you who might not be familiar with this term it's it's an important one to interrogate from a critical perspective but it's always good to start off with a definition pushbacks essentially are a state of a set of state measures by which refugees and migrants and people on the move are forced back over a border essentially in contravention of a foundational idea and refugee law called the principle of non-refuge or returning somebody to persecution or torture and it's it's a it's a practice that we've been uh documenting um as a team that you'll hear from today but also historically and essentially what happens is a state forces somebody over a border without giving them the chance to apply for asylum and this really sets the stage for a host of fundamental and human rights violations that are important to interrogate from an interdisciplinary perspective and therefore it's my pleasure to introduce to you our speakers today for the purposes of this event we really want it to be quite interdisciplinary but there's also one particular investigation that ties us all together today but maybe i will give the bios of the speakers and then i will let each of them introduce themselves in turn and give you a little bit of uh more detail about what they work on and why we are all coming together today so first of all we will have lydia emanuelido with us she's an independent audio and multimedia journalist based in athens greece and she covers the country and the region with the focus of migration surveillance technology and far-right movements lydia is also the journalist in residence at the refugee law lab then we have yorgos cristides who is a greece-based reporter for the german news magazine der spiegel and he covers economic social issues and migration and then we have natalie gruber who is a co-founder of josuer a civil society organization and an active member of the border violence monitoring network which is a project of 15 grassroots organizations operating across the so-called balkan route collecting testimonies of pushbacks in an open source database and also supporting survivors as pushbacks and i should also note the idea behind this event really is also to act as a fundraiser for josuer because a lot of the work in this space would not be possible without our civil society partners who really do the grassroots work and organizing and pushing the conversations forward um we decided to make this event free but i really would encourage you to consider making at least a small donation to joe sewer and i will share a link with you in the chat their work is truly invaluable um i've worked with them before and so have many uh who are actually attending today and i would really encourage you to support their work uh if you can so without further ado i will turn it over to uh your quest christine your guys would you be able to tell us a little bit about your framing your your position and how you come to work on these issues of pushbacks right um hello everyone thanks for being here um i'm first right can i be heard or yeah yes great thank you um so um for me migration has been a major part of our work at the spiegel as a greece-based reporter since at least 2016 but most especially after uh the 2020 uh crisis at the everest uh land border that's one way we decided as an uh media as a media organization that we should really devote resources and and and do in-depth investigations on what what on earth is happening on external borders in in europe um lately we have focused especially on the on the role and and possible implicitly of frontex as well and in what is going on uh in this area and we have done a lot of work in the past two years both alone as the spiegel but also in collaboration with other international media including i don't know liberation etc and other other actors like natalie joshua and with the help of um of lawyers like petra who's uh infatiable and always always working working hard to help us without without who's who's whose contributions and help we wouldn't be able to do our job um so i think we've created some sort of ecosystem uh if you like uh between media and and and ngos and and local actors and and lawyers and and activists and and people who are interested in this and i believe that in the past couple of years we have documented beyond any any reasonable doubt uh unless you're blind or you're uh you want to hide your your your um your head under the how do the ostriches do well what's the expression petra help me out here like you hide your like like you know um so i think it's very clear that what's happening at the us external border at least in greece uh thanks to all those people and i'm really looking forward to to talking about our work in detail if you want i just just want to make a small small remark a final remark uh in one of our latest investigations all the panelists that you can see here so uh that will be natalie gruber and petra molnar and lydia manolivo we all work together in this and this has been one of the most [Music] heartbreaking but also well established and and well documented cases uh not just of a pushback but actually of what i would call a kidnapping of people uh who made it deep inside greek territory before they were being forced back to turkey without having an access to to asylum thanks so much your guts and thanks for flagging that yes we will indeed be discussing this uh specific case because it's i think a really important way to ground some of the you know theoretical and political topics that we talk about in a really specific uh situation um but before we get to that i'm going to turn it over to lydia emanuelido who is actually also the refugee law lab new journalist in residence and i should also note lydia and i just got back from the polish belarussian border um about an hour and a half ago so if uh our remarks are a little bit scattered it's because we've had a pretty rough couple days but i really look forward to hearing your thoughts lydia and thanks for being with us today yeah and thank you guys all for um coming it's nice to see some uh some names i recognize on the screen so i'm lydia manuelido as petra said i'm an audio independent audio journalist based in athens at the moment i've been working primarily in audio for the last 10 years or so mostly for american public radio and have been based in greece have been focusing on greece and migration also more exclusively since the avros 2020 crisis if you want to call it that as yoro said all the panelists here we what brought us together recently was this investigation that we all did about um a particularly heartbreaking pushback case that involved two children and i'm looking forward to getting into that um oh and i should mention i'm sorry in addition to being an independent audio uh reporter i'm i'm going to be working and i am working with the refugee law lab as their first ever journalist in residence so i'll be working alongside petra and some other colleagues there to look at the intersection of migration and surveillance and migration management technology so in that you know i think audio in particular um has uh an intimacy that you can provide a kind of intimacy and bring people's personal stories to people in the way that you might not be able to through other media and i um in all the the reporting that i've done and moving forward in the work that i'm doing through rll and through other media partners um i'm my priorities to really center the stories on on the humans who are affected and the humans who are impacted by whatever um you know migration policy uh practice it is we're covering at that particular point in time um the latest thing i've been working on as petra said is we were just at the poland belarus border uh we just got back a couple hours ago and are both running on a couple hours of sleep uh so i'm looking forward to talking more about that um and take your questions thanks so much lydia and i know that you will sleep well tonight after a hard couple days um but last but not least i'm going to turn it over to natalie natalie can you tell us a bit about yourself and also about josue and the work that you're doing sure uh thank you so much for organizing all this and thank you so much for doing this as a fundraiser we really need the money right now um and yeah i basically um to sue i co-founded it in 2015 in austria it's an association non-profit um where initially we focused on integration of at that time newly arrived refugees in austria germany and other other central european countries um in 2018 we paused the work and basically that went back to all our normal jobs that we were doing before and which for me was i have a background in international development so i was then working on a women empowerment project in nepal um and then in march 2020 uh with the events that lydia already touched on uh this ebros crisis where uh turkey decided to uh announce that the borders are open and the thousands of people went there voluntarily and other thousands of people were forced by turkish authorities to the border um in a similar process that is currently happening at the border you just returned from the that was the time that just actually started operating in turkey so when we with a completely new team but under the same uh association went to the turkish side of that border um initially only as a short-term emergency response project um and then quickly discovered that there is actually a big gap in that area especially on the turkish side of that border um in support and also in monitoring um so we started uh and what we have been doing since uh basically april 2020 after this uh crisis in february march last year was resolved in that sense uh we've been supporting survivors of pushbacks from both greece and bulgaria both the sea and the and the land borders uh to turkey we are providing um short-term accommodation for people because um i guess we will go in more into depth about what is actually happening uh during a pushback but people end up in turkey and in other countries um without anything left they have all their belongings taken from them during the pushback they often are pushed back even naked or semi-naked um so basically we provide short-term accommodation for them to just recover from that stress and trauma and at the same time also plan their next steps um we also of course then provide food and any basic needs like like new clothes and and at the same time we also unfortunately have more and more expenses for medical care because pushbacks are becoming more and more brutal and we have to hospitalize more and more people all of which do not have access to health care in turkey so that is incredibly expensive and unfortunately also a project we recently started is focusing on missing people and we are seeing more and more people go missing having more reports about um about people just disappearing being carried away by the current in the border river um and also dying so this is basically what we are doing at the same time of course we also uh for the monitoring part i always ask people that have just been pushed back if they are willing to give a testimony if they are we then uh take a detailed testimony of their experience where we try our best to identify the exact locations and perpetrators involved in the pushback gather as much evidence as possible and all this we do under the framework of bbmn which petra already explained a bit it's a network of 15 grassroots organizations um along the so-called balkan route in this case basically we have partner organizations um in many different countries like slovenia croatia serbia bosnia and greece and with us in turkey and we have several working groups in in that network um of course the main part is the is the collection of testimonies that we publish in this open source database that anybody can access and we have by now around 1 400 testimonies if i'm not mistaken which represents the experience of more than 30 000 people um so it is a lot it is very systematic it is occurring on all the different borders we are focusing on europe now but the same uh procedure is is uh happening in many other parts of the world as well um and yeah and then what we are trying is the as the network also is advocate against these violations um we have eu advocacy teams we have un advocacy teams we write submissions we try our best to um yeah basically advocate for the very basic rights of people um sometimes more certainly successfully with the current development uh not very um successfully i would say but i mean we do have always like we have lots of uh successes in the sense that it is a topic now that the majority i would say is aware of that is being discussed and that is also uh thanks to all the people that jorge was mentioned uh thanks to journalists thanks to lawyers thanks to um activists but also the one thing you did not mention is uh the people on the move themselves i think this is a very crucial thing to mention because uh first of all with chasseur at the half of our or more than half of our ground team at the moment here in turkey are themselves people from the community of people on the move who at some point decided to try like they were shocked at what they themselves have experienced in their pushbacks and decided to try and do something against it and then those people we basically do our best to employ them if we have the money um and and basically also we all over turkey have like small teams um of people from the different communities who uh started community projects um and then we tried to support them in in their projects right um yeah i think that's uh maybe maybe a bit more than a brief introduction but uh yeah that's that's right and it's an important introduction thanks natalie i mean you and your group uh really are integral to a lot of the conversations that are being had about these topics and i think it just goes to show that the importance of working from an interdisciplinary perspective is really the only way forward to try and move the conversation in a meaningful way on these issues and centering the lived experiences of people on the move themselves that is a crucial crucial important uh piece to all of this um but i think what's also helpful uh particularly for the audience members who might not be super familiar with with some of these situations um is to really bring this down to the ground and talk about one specific case that unites actually all four of us um and that is a case that happened earlier this year um if it's okay your voice i might um love this to you uh if you would be able to give us a little bit of a kind of background on on what happened how the investigation unfolded who some of the key players were and and where he kind of ended up and then maybe i'll turn it over to you lydia to to supplement and also talk about the importance of working from different perspectives the audio the the reporting and then also um the the role of josuer um right thanks uh thanks for okay so the main narrative by the government is that whatever happens at the border is like you know they stop someone before entering greek territory right so the the main argument by the greek government at the time is that my uh asylum seekers migrants are stopped before entering uh greece and then they are somehow uh you know kept at arm's length before they're picked up by the turks okay so that's number one but here we have uh increasing evidence uh for quite quite a while that people are being picked up from deep inside greek territory uh they're being arrested uh and they're being clandestinely uh transferred back to the to the border with turkey where they are sent back without any access uh being given to them uh to to any kind of asylum process so this is uh this has for me at least this has been all theoretical until very recently when i received a call from you that you mentioned that you had heard that that that the group of syrian people from the same village had actually crossed everest to greece and what should they do uh me being a bit of uh naive as i am my my kind of first thought was that since there were two miners with them the best thing would be to do to alert the authorities and let them handle with this right um obviously the people there didn't quite accept my view and then uh i don't know what was it like a week later um you told me that the group had reached some place 150 kilometers deep inside inside uh greek greek uh the greek mainland me and and and the uncle of one of the miners we met in thessaloniki i saw his child we ate together he described the whole thing she had videos and photos and stuff like that that proved beyond doubt that the whole team was in greece did follow this path within greece et cetera et cetera and then this one of the two miners eventually made it to athens and he is now i think uh you know better he is waiting for an asylum decision all the rest of the group in some sort of uh magical kind of way uh in the next 24 hours they were suddenly reappeared resurfaced in istanbul right so unless they kind of decided uh i don't know they themselves decided that oh it was nice walking for 150 miles in the greek woods let's go back to istanbul i mean it's quite obvious what happened so they they testified that how they were apprehended uh how they were put into uh into into unmarked police vehicles how they were put into detention center like police centers and how they were eventually pushed back to turkey where they resurfaced uh at that time so what binds us all together is that that you knew about about this group and offered some legal advice that natalie met the people who were there uh in istanbul the day after they were pushed back and me and lydia having actually met the single one one one of the one of the group who who escaped this kind of predicament uh we met him both in thessaloniki and athens we interviewed him so we have like a a very comprehensive case of a pushback um so this is not an exception by any by any standards uh but it is something that that can be is so well documented i think it's one of the most well documented cases that that we have worked so far um how people are being even some say kidnapped from within the greek mainland and then and then uh thrown back to turkey without any access to to to asylum thanks thank you guys and lydia please go ahead yeah and i think one point to jose did a great job covering it but i think one point to underscore is that this um group you know they they made it into the greek territory and they they um they kept walking um and they tried to avert authority specifically because they were afraid that if they were caught if they presented themselves to authorities they would be pushed back and so i think that's a really important point to underscore that people don't feel that they can um you know go and present themselves to the authorities to apply for asylum in greece particularly in the everest region because they are afraid that even if they've made it this far into the church into greece they will be pushed back um and another aspect of this story was that you know there were several um ngos and uh and other actors that that were contacted that they too could not really guarantee the safety of even the miners in the group there were two two miners one um 12 year old and one 14 year old boy one of them um ended up as yoga said making it to athens and he's now in a shelter where she's going through the asylum process in a shelter front accompanied minors the other one was pushed back to turkey uh and even the the the ngos and groups that were contacted to ensure the safety of the children felt like they they had nothing in their toolbox to be to be able to do that um and of course this gets at some of the you know uh criminalization and and um that we've that we've seen against not just people on the move but people who are working um to help uh asylum seekers and and refugees particularly in greece um i think another part of the story the one something that we covered throughout this reporting is how and and yellow along with other reporters has done a lot a lot more work looking at this aspect of of pushback is how systematized it seems seems to be um you know speaking to to the people both the the to the people who were pushed back um they they described um being taken from one you know police station to another being stripped naked handled beaten um their testimonies reveal a kind of um coordination um and systematization uh that i think is important to to to underscore also um and i think yeah and and you know a lot of we relied a lot on the work that jasor and natalie and her colleagues did once the group was pushed back to turkey they thoroughly took their testimonies um documented all their injuries and shared all that evidence and without that kind of work reporters like us are not you know able to to do the work and to document people's stories in the way that we were in the way that we were able to in this case thanks lydia yeah natalie would you mind telling us a little bit about what that documentation was like and and what it was like to meet this group in istanbul um sure um i mean this was an exceptional case in several ways i mean we do sometimes um get alerted by by different actors in in greece that we should look out for for a group being pushed back and this was especially the case last year when there was kind of a big campaign pushing people back from outside a camp in thessaloniki to turkey when sometimes we were told oh today police came took 50 people from here maybe you can find them in turkey sometimes we were able to sometimes not um in this case the other exceptional circumstance was it was a hard lockdown at that time in turkey so it was really tricky for us to um actually get to them um and yeah we were able to and then um it's it's basically the same as as in all the other cases unfortunately this you you go to this um house where you have i don't know and numerous families living in a small place without uh heating without i don't know any basic amenities um and then with this group specifically i felt like there was um there was so much shock and i i think i mean it always depends on do people know about border violence before they attempt is it the first attempt did they try several times how how like the level of trauma they have from this pushback but in in this case i feel it was a bit more severe than than usually and i i believe that might actually be because so many actors were alerted of them being in in greece and i think that maybe this also had an impact on them in the sense that like they sensed this general helplessness and powerlessness that everybody who is trying to to work on preventing that is is experiencing um uh also what made it quite like actually this was a really emotional um testimony for me and our translator who is a great syrian guy who's been working with us for more than a year now and uh so we are all used to this like right we we take i don't know how many hundreds of testimonies a year um and what happened here was a bit more like sometimes people feel like they have to justify why they attempted or why they are trying to get to europe we never ask for that but sometimes people just start telling us this and there was this um moment where one of the the adults in the group said that they explained that they were living in lebanon they moved there after their after massacre in in their city they moved to lebanon and they um tried to build a life there but when the second child when his second child died of malnutrition uh they decided to leave and and when he was saying this like this is something that you are not like we are unfortunately hardened um a bit jaded with hearing all these uh reports about pushbacks but then this unexpected really tragic um part of their story comes out and when he said that one of the other adults started crying uh our translators was like sorry i need a minute before i can translate this um trying not to like trying to hold back the tears um and in the end we couldn't like we were just sitting there all of us crying together and that was a completely bonding experience also in the end um but yeah so basically it it was as horrible as all the other stories with a bit more of a shock element i think because i don't know how many like there were dozens of actors are alerted of that and none of them could do anything about it um and i just wanted to say when you were talking about uh people being afraid of of uh approaching authorities in greece we actually since then this was about this was early september we had another case where a one group member of the transit group got seriously ill in the forest in greece he was left behind by his group and then another group that had nothing to do with him um found him in the forest basically slowly dying and they decided to all four of them carrying him on his on their backs taking them to to police presented themselves to police saying this guy needs medical care hoping they would actually bring him to a hospital instead they took the whole group uh to the border pushed them back not even to turkey but to an island in the river where they stayed for five days because border guards on both sides of the border did not allow them to cross and this man eventually ended up dying on this island and so this is what's happening basically every day um and sometimes we are able to document it quite well sometimes we are able to prove people were in greece most of the time that's not even possible thank you for sharing that natalie and um i think you you really encapsulated a lot of the complications that are present when trying to assist people who are um crossing and who are in need of legal help of civil society help of medical help and yet as borders are sharpening around the world it becomes increasingly difficult to to be able to do our jobs and and that is incredibly difficult on people who also work in this space so really appreciate all the work that you're doing um i'm just going to zoom out actually and perhaps we can broaden the discussion because we have been talking about one specific case in greece one that affected all four of us quite deeply but of course this is one case of thousands and not just in greece um as i mentioned before for example lydia and i were just at the polish belarussian border and and pushbacks are systematized there now um for a number of months of course pushbacks have been happening for for years and this is a historical practice um that has been endemic to fortress europe and other contexts as well but there has been this perhaps intensification is the right word to describe it or perhaps more attention being paid to to what is happening but i would like to get at some of the kind of forces that are enabling um why certain states feel kind of empowered to to be able to crack down on migration in these violent sharp ways and also perhaps to situate it and to bring in the tech angle since we are the refugee law lab and i in particular look at surveillance and securitization of the border and trying to understand how new technologies are also making it more difficult for people on the move to claim asylum and how they are weaponized against people who have a right to seek asylum um so i'm wondering lydia uh if you are able to and please only share as much as as you feel comfortable with uh would you be able to tell us a little bit about um some of our recent experiences in poland and and how you see this fitting into this broader conversation around pushbacks yeah absolutely so um so yeah so so we spend i'll start abroad and then i'll talk a little bit about the tech stuff too so so we spent um the last few days on the uh uh poland belarus near the poland uh belarus border where um i'm not sure how familiar people are with the situation but currently there are thousands of um mostly we believe iraqi uh kurds uh people who want to seek asylum who are essentially trapped at the border between belarus and poland um and are not they're trying to enter poland and they're not uh being they're not being allowed to and and the ones that do make it are then pushed back into belarus and then once again pushed back into poland one activist we spoke with on the ground describes this described used the word ping pong people are literally being ping-ponged between the two sides of the border these are you know not just um these are women children families um and several people have died so far in the in the cold from hypothermia from from a number of injuries so what we've seen uh poland do over the last um couple months as you know there's a lot of geopolitics here involved and we we could get into it and a lot of the news has focused on that but i'm just gonna focus on on the people who are at the border and you know what they've what they've experienced and how poland has has responded to the fact that they're there um we've seen poland but also lithuanian and latvia um kind of changed the the laws essentially to allow to essentially legalize pushbacks without getting too deeply into the um into the legal side of this um poland right now is it it's no secret that they are that they are pushing back people who are trying to to enter uh to enter the country um and you know we've seen um this uh something that con something that um uh poland has talked about doing in response to this crisis is funding um stronger barriers walls not necessarily physical barriers and this is where the tech comes in um inspired by countries like greece and serbia we've heard turkish polit sorry not turkish polish politicians uh talk about how they want a lot of funding going to thermal cameras to drones technologies that are really aimed at spotting um and facilitating the the return of people who are who are trying to cross uh this is something we're seeing on the um on the everest border uh in greece but also throughout throughout europe um and so there's i think increasingly we're seeing a lot of discussion about barriers being erected to prevent people from coming in and again these are not necessarily physical barriers but invisible smart barriers that include as i said cameras thermal cameras drones all sorts of new technologies another on the tech side a couple of under a couple of other interesting things i wanted to mention that we saw in um during our time on the ground in poland um you know there was in terms of the covering uh covering the situation there there were a lot of reports of um or some reports of um journalists um phones uh being tracked in in certain ways uh people's communication devices these are people on the move as they were trying to cross being destroyed in certain ways so that they couldn't um you know communicate or report or document the experiences that they were going through and so these are some of the threads that we'll be following following up on in the you know in the coming weeks and months and particularly looking at some of the technologies and these are by the way there's a lot of money coming from the eu to fund some of these new um tech powered border walls so this is one thing that we'll be looking at in the coming in the coming weeks thanks lydia and can you also um talk a little bit about that text message that we all got as we approached the order it's an interesting piece to this too how it's really closing the space for monitoring for lawyers for journalists to even make it close to the issues as they're happening yeah so i mean as some of you might already know right now the border area there's there's basically a three kilometer restricted zone um on the polish side and no no media and this is a border that runs you know hundreds of kilometers i think 400 in total um and journalists could not not just journalists but aid groups activists could not access this area so so for one it was really hard you know we were on the ground we were you know stones throw away from from from the border from where people were um but we could not access it uh there were police checks uh army checks checkpoints throughout the area and every time we would try to approach um we would be stopped uh we they would you know ask for our documents often they would want to see in our trunk um and uh as we approached the uh the the border the the first time when we were driving from warsaw towards the belarus border everyone in our car received this text that was from what i understand targeting this is an automated text that goes out to all foreign so non-polish cell phone numbers that approach the border it's not really intended for people on you know on the polish side of the border it's intended for the for the for the asylum seekers the migrants on the belarus side and it basically said go back um uh don't don't don't come to poland the the bella russian government has told you has told you lies and then a couple days ago another we received another one as we were approaching the border um that said something along the lines of you know you will not be able to make it to germany if you if you try to to cross uh because a lot of uh people seem to be under the impression that either they can enter germany through immediately through through belarus when they're coming into poland or that it will be quite you know um this is these are things that some people are told that it it will be easier than it actually is to reach germany so this is kind of a you know this is a deterrence uh method that the polish authorities are trying to use but one of the things we you know we want to look into is these kinds of sorry that was a good thing right that they dispel the fake news i mean well so i i do wonder about the effectiveness of something like that for one it is in english of course a lot of people speak english uh but it doesn't seem to you know a text message it does not necessarily debunk a lot of the things that you might be hearing directly from the people who from belarus and belarusian soldiers um or authorities who are telling you a completely different thing or even forcing you to you know these are some of the things that journalists have um heard from the belarusian side that people are being forced literally to try to cross so i i'm not sure about the effectiveness of the text message um and and one thing that i i was talking with activists about on the ground who who have been able to at least um digitally get in touch with people on the other side with uh asylum seekers on the other side was you know is are are people getting word that this that the reality that they've been sold or what they think they might encounter on the other side is is is not actually what they might believe and with more media coverage it seems like a lot of people are becoming more aware of the reality but still in this situation you know despite despite despite all of that um i mean we all hear this all the time reporting on on people on the move people feel they have no other choice despite all the hardship despite what they might face um it doesn't matter um they have no other choice thanks lydia thanks thanks for telling us also about the the recent trip um because it is it is such a developing situation that i'm not sure you know that people in outside of europe are paying sufficient attention to and and the more coverage that we have of what's going on hopefully more engaged audiences uh we will be able to you know move the conversation forward but i think it's also important to to realize that this is the latest sharpest very violent manifestation of this but it's not by no means the only one and you know i know that um josuer and and the border violence monitoring network has been doing a lot of great work on for example chain push backs along the so-called balkan route for many many years natalie would you mind telling us a little bit about that and how it kind of fits into this broader picture of what we've been trying to paint sure um i mean in general i would again just uh emphasize how many parallels there are between what lydia just described and what happened early 2020 here at the greek turkish border including these text messages by the way um and uh yeah so basically i mean maybe just a bit on the history of pushbacks in in this region um where there were some in like individual cases of pushbacks long before they were even called that um already in the in the 90s and then um i think that basically the the systematic aspect of it started developing maybe around 2013 14 uh at least the media attention at that point was was on that uh at the bulgarian turkish border um and at the same time also of course the the greek turkish aerospot or shortly after it became more and more um yeah just the attempt of the authorities to deal with uh migration um and of course completely clandestine and largely denied um until recently which i think we will discuss later um and um what we've seen since the border islands monitoring network started monitoring the situation is that it's consistently increasing both in geographical scope and also in systematics and in just the numbers of people who are subjected to this practice and we also as a border violence monitor network constantly basically expand uh our network in adding new partner organizations from new countries because the practice of pushbacks expands as well um so by now i am from austria originally and uh there are pushbacks from austria to slovenia there are then these are chained pushbacks that immediately uh end up uh taking people from austria to slovenia or hungary also there's different routes um through croatia and serbia and bosnia we have this one case that i like to mention this this one afghan boy who um was pushed back 32 times five times he had reached slovenia and in the end he went ended up all the way back in turkey um and now with the recent response of turkish authorities to the increase of afghans arriving in turkey um there are also pushbacks of afghans from istanbul to iran there are basically forced voluntary returns of syrians to syria from turkey um so i would i would say that basically this this whole completely illegal practice of pushbacks has become the main pillar of the european border regime's externalization which is um which is shocking honestly to to have this um not just illegal but completely criminal in many different ways practice being the main response of europe to people looking or seeking seeking safety um and it's i think what's also important always to point out is that what we are monitoring is just a tiny part of what's actually happening because in all the borders you do not have access neither journalists in most cases nor us um and this is something that the bbmn has been advocating a lot or in general people advocating in this in this area have been calling for a long time for an independent border monitoring mechanism which is kind of discussed also in the u but it is the way it's set up is absolutely not fulfilling what it should be fulfilling um and yeah um i i would say that basically when when this has become the norm for for authorities in in the external uh borders of the eu logically it extends or will keep expanding um to all the borders because um all of the all of the of the countries um in in europe um don't really have an answer don't really have a response to don't have a policy on on migration other than externalization and deterrence um and yeah i i think we will see much worse in the in the next few years also thanks natalie your question you want to add anything to this broad picture uh we we i don't know a lot i don't know i mean uh for for a country like greece listen uh we have to be a bit realistic as well here uh so uh to to understand how the greek response to to turkey or um i'm not i'm not that well-versed about poland uh at the moment but i will stick to greece right so in order to understand this events like what happened in evros cannot be uh separated from what 95 percent of greeks perceive as as a hostile action by a host hostile country at a very militarized border which has has been militarized for the past i don't know century or so you know so um so for for someone living in germany or holland or or or i don't know sweden um like um like extrapolating what's happening at that border with what's happening in in the greek uh turkish border it's quite different so uh in my view and this is this is what what what explains why 90 percent of greeks backed the greek government at the time is that indeed indeed turkey is seen as a hostile actor which is using or can always use migration flows as leverage of course the uh the counter argument in this uh that i've read in in in several [Music] articles by colleagues and some reports is that uh when you when when for example the current greek government uh highlights that this is our big success like that we minimize flows nobody's coming etc you give you give erdogan or you give lukacenko this kind of leverage right that they can always try to destabilize you or or create problems with you even with a minimal amount of of of people uh looking to cross your border um whereas if you had an actual uh eu-wide policy of equal distribution this would be this would not be an issue right so uh so that eu countries could take all those people who are now stranded at the border uh with belarus and then uh equally distribute them examine their applications and then decide what to do with them but um i mean at any rate uh i i think one one should also take this also should also take this into account and understand that for for 90 percent of the greek people uh this is not a migration issue and this is not a refugee issue anymore uh it's it's it's an issue of of of a foreign power a hostile power versus arts enemy using it's it's a very very big number of asylum seekers and refugees to destabilize the country for better or worse and this needs to be taken into account in any policy response uh going forward and for me the only policy response going forward uh if you ask me is is is is a is an eu wide i don't know agreement asylum system that that is based on equal burden sharing that that that uh the the the islanders of lesbos or heroes or samos or cause do not feel like they they got the short stick of the of the the of the bargain you know that whatever happens we are the ones who are going to suffer with it but the whole eu can can can uh deal with this thing in a humane and equitable kind of kind of way thanks thanks for situating that you us and i think you're absolutely right i mean we need to think of these issues from a regional and indeed a global perspective because it is ultimately about the distribution of geopolitical power as well and which which nation states are kind of at the sharp end of policy making and have to do the work for richer states that like to wash their hands of all the things that they're actually funding and then where the policy uh kind of impetus really comes from um because i'm conscious of time and i want to make sure that we have enough time for q a and please those of you in the audience add your q a questions into the chat and i will try and collate them so that we can get to as many as possible but i want to end the discussion with kind of a broader question you know what's next what do we do about this in in my perspective at least and and perhaps this is just also showing my recent fatigue i just i'm really starting to lose a little bit of hope because it it really is it seems like these issues are ramping up at such a speed and then across all these different contexts it really feels like we've kind of lost the plot on on migration and human rights and the kind of basic issues of what we owe to each other in this increasingly divided world but what do we do about it when the the conversations around migration are becoming so polarized when activists are being criminalized when journalists can't even go to the border to report what's happening it's really difficult to see a way through but i really hope that you know there there is a way for me what keeps me going is knowing that i have amazing colleagues out there who do the work and that we all work together in an interdisciplinary perspective to try and illuminate some of these issues but i'm curious to hear from from the three of you what you think might be the way forward olivia do you want to take a crack at it first we're having trouble hearing you i think i think your audio might be out no worries while lydia's figuring that out maybe i can turn it over to natalie yeah sure um i think um what i've been saying for the past few years is that i think we have reached a decision point where we need to like and and we in this sense it's basically the global community because um as i said earlier this is not europe-specific i think the focus on europe um is justified in several ways um but it is not is not unique to europe it's happening in southeast asia it's happening in central america it's uh thanks to the eu also happening in uh north africa and so on uh but um yeah so so that's what i what my point was the last few years that i think we're approaching a decision point where we have a choice uh to either um find a humane way to deal with the fact that people are and have always been migrating uh especially for those who are not migrating on their own will but because of uh because they are displaced for forcefully for for various reasons and we have to find that soon because when you look at uh climate change and what that will uh what that will impact uh when it comes to migration um what we are seeing now is like the numbers of people uh globally displaced is nothing compared but what we will see in a few decades um so if we cannot even find a humane response to to this now um we basically will have to decide and it is a decision we will like if we do not decide to deal with this in a humane way according to international law um we will uh have to reach a point at some point where we just seriously kill people on our borders who try to come because people who don't have another choice who don't have any other option who cannot survive where they are will try anything to go to a place where they can live um and the impact of that what what you already touched on also with the criminalization i we ourselves we have two criminal cases in greece at the moment more than half of our partner organizations in the border violence monitoring network are being criminalized in many different countries um of course all the search and rescue organizations are heavily criminalized um inclu increasingly also journalists are being criminalized journalists are working on on this field um and so what we can see already now is that um this impacts not just people at the borders this has huge consequences for the rule of law in in our own countries for our own citizens this has huge consequences for um our democracy frankly um and it has also big consequences i think for ourselves like collective psychological consequences when we are getting so hardened and so used to such brutality um and i this as i started saying this is what i used to say in the last few years to be honest i feel like we are losing that fight at the moment and we are going to this direction where we will do anything to keep people out including the most brutal things you can imagine yeah it's it's really hard to see that especially the criminalization aspect and i just shared a link for those who are interested there's a trial happening this week on the island of lesvos um that might be uh it's very relevant to to this discussion too lydia do we have your back do you want to add anything uh can you hear me now yes yes okay great yeah i mean you know as a personally i'm also not feeling particularly um optimistic about uh the situation um but as a journalist the best thing i can do is to continue to cover these stories and to really center them around the people who are experiencing some of these brutal policies i think one thing that's been interesting particularly over the last week here in greece people might have seen this very heated exchange between a dutch journalist and the greek prime minister prime minister mitotaki said a press conference i think last week when she was very in a way that he's not usually asked very directly asked about pushbacks and when he will stop lying about them um and of course the there's the the the um the the the conversation that's followed has been problematic in all sorts of ways and this journalist has been torn apart in the greek media but i i found myself hearing from from greek family i'm greek american if i didn't already mention i have much of my families here in greece hearing from um greek family that i never asking me about you know pushbacks and this just this whole issue and the question around it in a way i haven't before so that was a moment um of a tiny bit of optimism where i felt like this was entering this discussion was entering a little bit more of the mainstream in a way that i personally haven't seen in the last in the you know year and a half or so that i've that i've uh been here but yeah i i think for me as a journalist my my job and the best thing i can do right now is to continue to cover these um these stories thanks lydia yeah and i remember just uh when when the whole situation with with the journalists that you mentioned was happening i was in a taxi here and i heard it kind of on just a basic greek radio show they were talking about pushbacks i mean that is that is something i think to to really uh take heart in the fact that these conversations are being had at different levels that perhaps uh we were not able to kind of penetrate or tap into before yours i'm curious to hear what you think where do you think this is all going and what confused this okay listen uh as far as journalism is concerned for me uh what is paramount is to keep on exposing uh the that that uh powerful institutional actors uh say uh or be it in in in in you know legislation or what's happening what you know putting you know putting the authorities uh under the spotlight and and and and demanding you know explanations and shedding the light and showing what's happening uh and and i don't know i was i was in turkey uh for like uh nine days recently i i saw like eu funded eu funded um how to say border surveys border surveillance technologies being deployed at the border with iran in order to stop the the afghans um you know so i think for me i mean i see my job as a reporter as like you know just just bringing out what's happening i'm not i'm not like a big a big like uh thinker or a migration expert or someone who who has solutions up up his pocket or whatever uh well what i what i think i can do as a reporter is just just you know watch things and and and report them as as honestly as i can and and raise awareness of what's happening and then people can make up their own minds and uh if i go one step further i think that um i will be even more more radical that than some some might expect me to be i mean what i think is is the ultimate solution is like you you need some kind of i don't know like a universal basic income some some sort of some sort of mechanism that that doesn't doesn't uh make people feel desperate enough to take those routes in order to reach uh like like greece or or italy or whatever you know because i i mean what i'm trying to explain to my fellow greeks is that you have to be really really desperate to just attempt leaving even afghanistan to to to go to greece right you know because for so many people it says this is that's very simple decision you know that oh i'm poor in afghanistan i've heard that i don't know in athens i can sell some euros and feta and i'm going to be very rich or whatever you know it's not that easy i mean i mean even taking the boat sorry for the expression even taking the boat sorry again i did it again right uh sorry even taking the boat from from the texas car from the texas coast to the to the to the to the island it can be pretty damn spooky you know uh once we were there inside we were in in an unsinkable boat followed by nate by the navy by the by the coast guard uh and there was some rough season whatever and it were really spooked man i mean it was a really spooky experience so it's not it's not it's not like the easiest thing in the world that you take like all your children and then you just go into this boat you have to have a reason you know so maybe it's better to focus in the long term or i don't know in the immediate term in not having those bloody reasons for them to to do this you know um so uh i don't know i i'm in in the long term in the in the long run i think there should be some massive kind of uh read this redistribution of wealth among the the world and some sort of keeping people there being giving them opportunities to stay there uh and and and and then on the immediate kind of uh immediately that we should as a european union for example it makes me so pissed now uh about poland uh this is the part that we're being recorded right yeah or whatever uh i mean uh where for poland for example for for for so many years they have they have literally uh offered zero assistance to any frontline country right and i would make them so peace that there that they are willing to you know ask nato to intervene and the u.n and i don't know they're asking for help and they're asking for military and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah you know before that they were quite confident quite all right with saying that oh it's fine you know uh the greeks and the italians they're it's it's a shitty geography location that they found themselves in you know so i mean this total lack of of of you know kind of a common european solution that some are fighting for this is really infuriating because we are a half a billion kind of continent and we can easily take on the this kind of this kind of uh um yeah this level of thank you thanks your guys for that very passionate uh intervention uh we might have to bleep out a few words here and there and i'm joking i'm joking uh but i really appreciated um what you what you uh alluded to because you're absolutely right i mean these issues are much deeper than individual country responses we really are talking about the foundational issues that you know compel people to migrate in the first place and it's it's really mind-boggling to me that it even needs to be said like the the foundational idea that nobody wants to be a refugee right i mean this is i i can't even believe that we even have to have these kind of conversations and yet and yet all across the world things are just becoming sharper and sharper and more violent um i do notice that we have some questions in the chat um so i will oh sorry natalie i just uh noticed you on muting do you want to add anything i just wanted to yeah i just wanted to add something quickly uh because i this is i mean it's it's uh yeah uh basically uh i absolutely agree with what yoga said about universal basic income and about free distribution and so on um but then also you refer to refugees now and i think it's always very important to point out how how many different reasons there are for people to go it's very good what yoga said about how uh and this is always what i what i usually try to make a point of that um no matter what the original reason was for people to to leave their homes nobody does that nobody takes on this journey of uh desperation and violence from border to border to border uh if they don't really if they had any other choice basically um and i i think um it's just still important to to point out that it's not because you was you just only referred to the economic migrants and then petra you only refer to refugees so i think it's always quite crucial to to point out there are so many different reasons but i think we all here agreed that whoever takes this journey or attempts to take this journey um is aware of this possibly ending up in them dying and at least after the first border they they cross and experience pushback and violence they are very much aware of this possibility and then if people still keep trying that means they really don't have another choice whatever whether they are economic migrants or forcibly displaced absolutely and that's such an important reminder too to interrogate the kind of foundational categorization that's so common in this space i mean for those of you who know me you know i'm a very reluctant lawyer partly due to the fact that these categories that we're all forced to operate in you know the box of refugee versus economic migrant versus you know um internally displaced person i mean they don't really bear out in reality because why is it so hard for law and policy makers to understand that people can slip between different categories very easily human you know life is really complex and migration is complex and yet we are stuck in these kind of almost dogmatic ways of looking at it um that's i think part of the conversation that we need to have as well we do have one question um about uh whether there are any current debates in the eu regarding sanctions for the criminal acts of these pushbacks and the criminalization of refugees i don't know if anybody wants to take a crack at it as oh yeah yogurt go ahead uh sanctions as for example against greece uh right uh for pushbacks or whatever yeah okay um this is this is very hard to do uh there is some debate in brussels uh that that you know there is this infringe infringement procedure where where brussels can go against eu member states when they violate uh eu treaties and and stuff like that uh this has not been uh decided yet it would be a very um it would be very powerful uh symbolically if it happened but but you should need to understand that uh the the eu is high it's very torn and there's a lot of clashes and and it's it's it's a kind of gigantic animal that doesn't move very fast doesn't act very fast doesn't act very decisively there's various actors and so i wouldn't expect something very very quickly um out of it but there are cases uh which are pending in courts uh both both domestic and and international um and uh yeah we will have to sing yeah i would like to add something to that also because um of course this is one of the main things we are trying to push for in our advocacy work um and the thing is that um as yoga said there there are different camps in all of the new institutions they are having large discussions actually fights between each other and uh for example what i know it would be the european commission to the role to to actually they also have other tools they could also withdraw funding unlike not withdrawal but um yeah like they could also uh put some economic sanctions in that sense but um with the infringement i don't think that we will see that happen and that's because half of like half or one of the camps in the in the european commission um is just simply against it and the camp that is for it um they have this experience with hungary where they tried to to do that um and it basically failed dramatically um and they literally like one of them actually someone from the european commission told me literally um this would be like the last resort we have we don't have anything other than this uh anything more powerful or stronger than the infringement procedure and they are still shocked with how it fails um colossally with hungary um and so therefore i am quite sure that this will not happen anytime soon um yeah basically great thanks both we have another question of uh somewhat legal nature um do you think we are going to see some plans to scrap the refugee convention in the future i have some thoughts about it but i i'll leave that till the end i can also take this but i want to be talking all the time but i mean basically there are already calls for that there are calls for that um of course uh in social media by random users but also um by politicians and it's becoming um basically louder and louder maybe not everybody's saying it like this um but people are saying like uh we need to reassess the the the law if if this is the case um and this has been also our biggest fear for a long time that pushbacks will be legalized which means like this will only be possible i mean petra maybe you should actually explain this as the lawyer here um but um this would only be possible uh by changing the eu treaties and i don't know exactly how legally it would work with um the eu member states having ratified the geneva conventions and protocols and everything uh where this principle of non-riflemore is enshrined i don't know i don't know maybe petra you want to touch on this but um basically uh the legalization of pushbacks is one of the biggest fears and i feel we are fast approaching um that moment where actually and especially also now in the polish context again and

2021-12-16 04:03

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