The International Federation for Rights and Development (IFRD) strongly condemns the findings contained in Frontex Fundamental Rights Office investigations documenting grave abuses by Greek border authorities, including the use of masked third-country nationals acting under the instruction of Greek officers in pushback operations at the Evros border.
The most serious finding appears in Frontex Final Serious Incident Report 13125/2023, finalized on 28 December 2025. In that report, the Frontex Fundamental Rights Office concluded that Greek authorities, acting through three police officers and 10–20 third-country nationals masked with balaclavas and armed with knives, batons, and sidearms, detected, apprehended, abused, robbed, and forcibly returned a group of 61 migrants to Türkiye. The report explicitly states that these actions are attributable to the Greek authorities and that they amount to verified violations of the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment, the prohibition of collective expulsion, and the principle of non-refoulement.
According to the findings, the group was subjected to extreme violence and humiliation, including threats of death and rape, intrusive and sexualized body searches, beatings, stabbing, cutting, shooting, drowning, theft of personal belongings and documents, and forced return across the river without any individual examination of their cases. Frontex’s own investigators concluded that the masked individuals were acting under the instruction of Greek officers.
These findings are devastating. They point not only to unlawful pushbacks, but to the outsourcing of violence to irregular proxy actors. Whether described as auxiliaries, masked operatives, or third-country nationals, the substance is the same: vulnerable migrants were allegedly used as instruments of border terror under state direction. This does not reduce Greek state responsibility. It reinforces it.
The pattern is further supported by other Frontex reports included in the material. In Report 10180/2025, the Fundamental Rights Office found it likely that migrants intercepted near Rhodes were ill-treated by Hellenic Coast Guard personnel, including reports of masked men firing shots into the air, beatings, and towing migrants back out to sea before transfer to a coast guard vessel. In Report 11036/2025, Frontex found verified violations of dignity and protection from degrading treatment in the transfer of 15 Afghan migrants, including minors, in unsafe and abusive conditions by Greek officers near the Greek-Turkish border. In Report 11044/2025, Frontex found verified degrading detention conditions and likely physical mistreatment by police on Symi island.
Taken together, these reports expose not isolated misconduct, but a repeated operational pattern of abuse, opacity, degrading treatment, and denial of basic protections at Greece’s borders.
IFRD calls for:
- full criminal and administrative accountability for all Greek officers and units implicated in these abuses;
- an independent investigation into the recruitment, coordination, and use of masked third-country nationals in border operations;
- immediate suspension of any operational practices enabling proxy violence, pushbacks, and collective expulsions;
- full transparency from Frontex regarding all related incidents, evidence, video material, and follow-up measures;
- decisive action by EU institutions to ensure that no member state can continue systematic border abuse with impunity.
Europe cannot defend the rule of law abroad while tolerating masked paramilitary-style violence against refugees at its own borders. The Frontex findings make clear that what occurred at the Greek border was not mere misconduct. It was a system of abuse.
