Alleged mistreatment or failure to provide assistance by border guards: According to reports, migrants and refugees are constantly affected by this. However, convictions are rare.
Human rights violations by border officials against migrants and refugees are too rarely prosecuted, according to an EU report. “There is an impression of impunity,” says the document from the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) in Vienna. The report focused on countries on the EU’s external border – from the English Channel across the Mediterranean to the borders in the east, the Balkans and the Aegean Sea.
Credible reports of violence, mistreatment, failure to provide assistance or rejection of people seeking protection – so-called pushbacks – are constantly being brought forward by organisations of the United Nations and the Council of Europe as well as by human rights activists, it said.
Between 2020 and 2023, the FRA came across 118 disciplinary investigations against border guards in 16 countries. The fundamental rights agency is aware of punitive measures against officials in only eight cases – four in Croatia and four in Hungary. During the same period, there were also at least 84 criminal investigations against border guards, but only three convictions.
Although Greece has the largest number of suspected cases, no officials there have been disciplinary or criminal proceedings, according to the FRA. Dozens of complaints are also received each year against the EU border agency Frontex, the report said.
Due to a lack of or inadequate investigations, those affected are more likely to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights than to national courts, the FRA found. In recent years, the court in Strasbourg has identified deficiencies in investigations into a shipwreck in Greece that left eleven people dead and into the death of a six-year-old Afghan child in Croatia.
The FRA is now calling on EU states to regularly disclose violations of the law at the borders, to involve victims more in investigations, and to access officials’ GPS and mobile phone data to investigate allegations.
