Drift-backs in the Aegean Sea

For more than a decade, migrants and refugees making the sea crossing from Turkey to Greece have suffered egregious and well-documented violence at the EU’s southeastern frontier, including forced detention, arbitrary arrest, beatings and non-assistance.

Since March 2020, a new method of violent and illegal deterrence has been practiced. Migrants and refugees crossing the Aegean Sea describe being intercepted within Greek territorial waters, or arrested after they arrive on Greek shores, beaten, stripped of their possessions, and then forcefully loaded onto life rafts with no engine and left to drift back to the Turkish coast.

‘Drift-backs’, as the practice of abandoning asylum seekers at sea has come to be called by some, have become routine occurrences throughout the Aegean, often resulting in injuries and drownings. Today, the scale and severity of the practice continues to increase, with ‘drift-backs’ reported from the coast of the Greek mainland, and as far south as Crete.

Two photographs from different sources (left: AlarmPhone, right: Turkish Coast Guard) capturing the same drift-back event, south of Lesvos island, on 9 August 2020. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis, 2022)

‘Drift-backs’ are manifestly illegal and contravene international protocols, including the inalienable rights to apply for asylum and to seek rescue at sea.

Despite mounting pressure, to this day the Greek authorities deny that ‘drift-backs’ take place in the Aegean. The Aegean Sea is not only a hotspot of state violence but also a testbed for ways to obfuscate it. Entire maritime zones, militarised islets and uninhabited rocks remain off-limits to civilian access and oversight, and are exclusively navigated and managed by the military and Coast Guard. Rescuers, activists and journalists who operate in the region and report on human rights violations have been repeatedly criminalised and intimidated by authorities. Migrants who are intercepted there have their phones taken and destroyed before they themselves are made to disappear.

Photomatched still from footage taken from a Turkish drone showing Hellenic Coast Guard Vessel ΛΣ 134 leaving a group of seventeen asylum seekers on Başak islet, near Kastellorizo. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis, 2022. Original image: Turkish Coast Guard, 2021.)

Mobilising the direction of sea currents, the Hellenic Coast Guard uses ‘drift-backs’ to expel asylum seekers without having to enter Turkish territorial waters. Instead, natural processes and geographical features of the Aegean archipelago—currents, waves, winds and uninhabited rocks—carry out the expulsion, distancing the perpetrators from the impact of their lethal actions. These natural processes provide a measure of deniability for those perpetrators, shielding them from accountability.

But as our research shows, this is not a plausible deniability—rather, what emerges is a systematic, calculated practice, in which actors are aware of the lethal consequences of their actions.

Spanning a period of three years, from 28 February 2020, when the first drift-back case was reported and documented, to 28 February 2023, this interactive cartographic platform hosts evidence of 2,010 drift-backs in the Aegean Sea, this interactive cartographic platform hosts evidence of 2010 drift-backs in the Aegean Sea, involving 55,445 people Of these 2010 incidents, 700 were found to have taken place from, or off the shores of, Lesvos island, 238 off Chios island, 424 off Samos island, 283 off Kos, 212 off Rhodes and 123 in the rest of the Dodecanese. 26 deep ‘drift-backs’ were recorded, meaning that asylum seekers were intercepted deep inside Greek waters before being taken to the border and left adrift. One case was recorded in the North Aegean, off the island of Samothraki. FRONTEX, the European border and coast guard agency was found to have been directly involved in 122 of these cases, while it has knowledge of 417, having logged them in their own operational archives codified and masked as ‘preventions of entry’. In 3 cases, the German NATO warship FGS Berlin was present on the scene.

32 cases were recorded where people were thrown directly into the sea by the Hellenic Coast Guard, without the use of any flotation device. In 3 of these cases, the people were found handcuffed. 24 people were documented to have died during a drift-back, and at least 17 more went missing.

In mapping these cases, the platform is meant as a non-exhaustive and evolving tool, which will be updated at regular intervals for as long as this practice continues.

The information contained within the platform is the result of extensive collaborative research led by Forensic Architecture and its berlin-based sister organization, Forensis, with the participation of Border Violence Monitoring Network, Bellingcat Global Authentication Project, Amnesty’s Crisis Evidence Lab and the Digital Verification Corps (DVC), and monitors and NGOs such as Alarm Phone, Aegean Boat Report, Refugee Support Aegean, Legal Centre Lesvos, MSF Greece, de:border / migration justice collective, Refugee Biryani and Bananas, Greek Council for Refugees, Human Rights Legal Project and HIAS Greece.

The material comes from four main sources: the monitoring efforts of AlarmPhone Aegean and Aegean Boat Report who receive images and location pins directly from asylum seekers crossing the Aegean Sea; FRONTEX’s own JORA (Joint Operations Reporting Application) database, obtained in the form of a redacted spreadsheet by Lighthouse Reports through a FOI request, and which covers the period of March 2020 – August 2021; and the website of the Turkish Coast Guard, who document the drifting vessels their crews come upon daily, and upload the visual material along with brief reports to their website. Additional material was sourced and shared by local monitors, media and activists, and from open source research, including from previously published investigations by Bellingcat, Lighthouse Reports, Der Spiegel, BBC, Al Jazeera and the New York Times.

We also conducted interviews with survivors and relatives of people who drowned in the Aegean or were pushed back, obtaining material directly from their phones, and visited locations where groups went missing to find and document the physical traces of their landings.

A relative of a person who drowned off the island of Rhodes along with five more people in January 2021, showing photos of the disappeared during a filmed interview in Athens a few days after the incident. The survivors in the group were pushed back, and the six deaths were never registered by the Greek authorities. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis, 2022)

A group of asylum seekers on the shore of the island of Antikythera, on 4 July 2021 (right), and the same location filmed by an FA researcher three weeks later. The group was abducted from the island and later appeared drifting on life rafts off the Turkish coast of Kuşadası. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis, 2022)

Cases are categorised as verified, documented, and trajectory according to the evidence available. A case is logged as verified when it is either geolocated with a high degree of confidence in a way that confirms the location, time, and description given by the original source, or when the visual material or the cross-referencing of different sources allows us to confirm a drift-back has taken place without needing to geolocate it. Cases are logged as documented when we are unable to corroborate the report, but there is enough material to suggest a drift-back has taken place. Trajectory refers to cases for which we have more than one location, allowing us to map the movement of a group in space and time.

Locations are described as precise or approximate. Precise refers to locations we were able to geolocate with absolute precision, or, in the case of images and videos taken from the sea, within a margin of error of 100-200 metres. Approximate refers to locations that we were unable to verify, in which case we defer to the approximate location given by the source.

3D modelling allowed us to navigate between different events showing the same coast guard vessels, and models of life rafts—here a Lambo-57 patrol vessel and rafts made by Greek company Lalizas and purchased by the Coast Guard using EU funding. (Forensic Architecture/Forensis, 2022)

Evidencing the systematic and widespread nature of the practice and demonstrating relations between incidents, localities, and actors, this platform is already supporting ongoing legal action in local and European courts, independent monitoring, reporting, and advocacy, as well as growing demands for accountability and international calls for the defunding of national border guards and FRONTEX.