A confidential report by the European Anti-Fraud Office, dated February, points out that the European coastguard agency Frontex was aware of illegal returns of migrants from Greece to Turkey and even co-financed some of these repressions. A damning report, relayed by The world and Der Spiegelhad already partly contributed to the resignation, last April, of its former director, Fabrice Leggeri.
With our correspondent in Athens, Joel Bronner
In Greece, deportations, regularly violent, of asylum seekers and migrants bound for Turkey have particularly multiplied in the last two years, to the point of becoming an open secret.
But after the publication of the conclusions of this European report which links Frontex the refoulement of migrants and asylum seekers operated by Greece, Efsyn, the main Greek opposition newspaper, says it expects the equivalent of a huge explosion. These practices are contrary to international law and the Geneva Convention.
►To listen: In Greece, progressive criminalization of migrants and the crime of solidarity
In Athens, however – at least initially – a great silence takes the place of a reaction. And for good reason, at the top of the Greek state, officially, these refoulements of asylum seekers, although widely documented elsewhere, quite simply do not exist.
A position of denial and concealment that has long been untenable, not to say grotesque, which seems to have emerged from the European tension between certain humanist values displayed by the Union and an increasingly widespread political will for firmness at the borders.
In Greece, the first official reactions then paradoxically came from Berlin. According to a journalist from the daily KathimeriniGerman Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is currently visiting, thus “ refused to meet, to be photographed [ou] to have any contact with the (…) coast guard from the port of Athens.