Humanitarian Governance

Throughout October, numerous deadly shipwrecks and violent maritime interceptions occurred near Lesvos and other Aegean islands. These incidents led to preventable deaths, people going missing, and survivors reaching the islands in a state of severe psychological distress.

By order of the Prosecutor of the Reviewing Court, criminal proceedings are to be brought against four senior officers of the Coast Guard, including its current chief, whose case had been shelved by the prosecutor of the Piraeus Naval Court, and the survivors had lodged an appeal against the shelving.

In a complaint submitted on 11 September, four civil society organisations call on the European Commission to immediately initiate legal proceedings against Greece’s three-month suspension of the right to asylum and immediate deportation applied to people arriving from North Africa by sea.

The Mechanism for Recording Incidents of Informal Forced Returns (Recording Mechanism), established by the Greek National Commission for Human Rights (GNCHR) to strengthen objectivity and reliability in reporting incidents of informal forced returns from Greek territory, is releasing its 2024 Annual Report.