forcibly return asylum seekers to Türkiye, and who were alleged to have been operating mostly, in the region of Evros. In Greece, many legal practitioners have resorted to litigating cases directly to the ECtHR or to UN Committees, due to the ineffective procedure in domestic courts, as the policy of pushbacks seems ‘to have contaminated the judiciary’64 and the majority of investigations connected to pushbacks have been closed by public prosecutors by invoking lack of evidence. Many of these cases have been referred to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) as domestic remedies were ineffective. 65 Since March 2022 the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR) has represented66 468 Syrian and 39 Turkish refugees, including many children, before the European Court of Human Rights, especially in cases of persons who entered Greece through the land border and were in need of international protection. GCR filed 24 applications for interim measures (Rule 39), requesting humanitarian assistance and access to the asylum procedure. The ECtHR granted the requested interim measures for all cases and ordered the Greek government not to remove the refugees from the country’s territory and to provide them with food, water and proper medical care. The ECtHR also requested to be informed by the Greek government, amongst other things, on whether they have submitted an asylum application and whether they have had access to the asylum procedure and legal assistance. Some of the members of these 24 groups have been formally arrested by the Greek authorities but most of them complained that they were pushed back to Türkiye. It should be noted that persons even from the groups that were formally arrested, complained that, in the past they had been subjected to violent and informal return (pushbacks) to Türkiye from Greece. Furthermore, both with respect to those stranded on the islets and those in the Greek mainland, the refugees who complain that they have been pushed back to Türkiye, also complain that they were informally arrested by the Greek authorities, informally detained in an unspecified detention facility in the Evros region, they were ill-treated and were transferred to the Evros river bank where they were forcibly boarded on boats and pushed back to Türkiye. Moreover, since 2022 GCR sent at least 185 interventions to the Greek authorities for the cases of more than 1,000 refugees including many children, from Syria, Türkiye, Afghanistan and Iraq, who entered Greece from the Evros region seeking international protection. In approximately half of these interventions, the Greek authorities responded positively by locating them and providing them with access to the relevant legal procedures. However, with the remaining interventions, the Greek authorities either did not respond or replied that they had not been able to locate the refugees. In some of these interventions, which concerned refugees from Türkiye and Syria, GCR was informed later that the refugees had been informally and forcibly returned to Türkiye, without being given the opportunity to submit an asylum application. For the rest of these interventions, GCR has had no information on the whereabouts of the refugees. In parallel, GCR filed 11 appeals before the ECtHR which are pending before the Court. Out of these cases, 38 cases were recorded in the Mechanism for Recording Incidents of Informal Forced Returns of the National Human Rights Commission, of which GCR is a member. These cases are included, inter alia, in GCR’s report ‘At Europe's borders: between impunity and criminalization’, recently published and presented before the European Parliament.67 Among the above pending cases before the ECtHR, in Application no. 35090/22 K.A. and Others v. Greece (interim measures granted on 20 July 2022), 50 Syrian refugees who were allegedly stranded on 64 65 66 67 smugglers working with a gangmaster who is hosted in a container located in the carpark of a Greek police station. In return for their ‘work’ they received papers allowing them to stay in Greece for 25 days’: see Giorgos Christides et al, ‘Greek Police Coerce Refugees to Commit Illegal Pushbacks’, 30 June 2022, Der Spiegel, available at: https://bit.ly/3IvTGfB and Lighthouse reports, WE WERE SLAVES, 28 June 2022, available at: https://bit.ly/3MTla1G. Black Book of Pushbacks, December 2022, available at: https://bit.ly/3ou1EPJ, 14. Ibid. GCR’s Information Note on interventions and on interim measures granted by the ECtHR in cases regarding pushbacks, Updated on 19 April 2023, available at: https://bit.ly/3MxIErw. GCR, At Europe’s Borders: Between Impunity And Criminalization, 2 March 2023, available at: https://bit.ly/42pxqLJ. 33