- 60 137. At the outset, the CPT wishes to recall that the prohibition of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights entails the obligation not to send a person to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing that he/she would run a real risk of being subjected to torture or other forms of illtreatment (refoulement). This obligation is applicable to any form of forcible removal, including deportation, expulsion, extradition, informal transfer or “renditions”, and non-admission at the border. This is also evident from the wording of Article 33(1) of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, which refers to expulsion or return (refoulement) “in any manner whatsoever”. The principle of non-refoulement applies not only in respect of return to the country of origin, but also to any other country to which removal is to be effected or any other country to which the person may subsequently be removed (chain refoulement). Consequently, it is essential that foreign nationals have effective access to an asylum procedure which involves an individual assessment of the risk of ill-treatment in the case of a forcible removal, on the basis of an objective and independent analysis of the human rights situation in the countries concerned. The principle of non-refoulement is expressly recognised in Section 79 (1) (d) of Law 3386/2005 and in Sections 20 and 24 of Law 3907/2011 as an element prohibiting expulsion or leading to the compulsory postponement of the person’s removal. 138. In the course of the April 2018 visit, several foreign nationals alleged the occurrence of push-back operations from Greece to Turkey via boat across the Evros River border. These consistent and credible allegations were received by the delegation through individual interviews with 15 foreign nationals carried out in private at three different places of detention. They mainly referred to incidents that had taken place between January and early March 2018, whereas some dated back to 2017. The persons who alleged that they had been pushed back from Greece to Turkey had subsequently re-entered Greek territory and had been apprehended and detained by the Greek police. 139. Several of these persons alleged that they had been physically ill-treated by police and border guard officers or (para-) military commandos during such push-back operations. The alleged ill-treatment consisted in particular of slaps, punches and kicks to various parts of the body (including to the head), as well as baton blows to the head after the foreign nationals concerned had been made to kneel face-down on the boat during the push-back operations (i.e. all those who raised their head were systematically subjected to a baton blow to the head). Several persons complained that they – together with all the members in their group being pushed back – had been threatened, treated brusquely (i.e. pushed, dragged or thrown to the ground) and forced to board small inflatable boats. Usually, the persons who were described as the authors of the alleged ill-treatment were armed and had their faces covered with balaclavas; while some were dressed in police uniforms, others wore military fatigues.