and Palestine who entered Greece from the Evros region seeking international protection.91 In approximately half of these interventions, the Greek authorities responded positively, locating them and providing them access to the procedures provided by law. Regarding the rest of the interventions, the Greek authorities either did not reply or replied that they had not been able to locate them. In some of these interventions, which concerned refugees mostly from Syria and Türkiye but also from Iraq and Afghanistan, GCR was later informed that the refugees were informally and forcibly returned to Türkiye, without being given the opportunity to submit an asylum application. For the rest of these interventions our organization had no information on the whereabouts of the refugees. Greece is second in Europe in terms of the number of cases in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) granted interim measures for the period 2021-2023, according to statistics published by the Court. 92 According to these statistics, the Court has granted 177 interim measures related to Greece. Among them, and for the period 2022-2023, the ECtHR granted interim measures in 39 cases, represented by GCR, in which the applicants were facing a risk refoulement from Greece. Since 2019, GCR has filed more than 20 full applications before the ECtHR related to pushback cases, the majority of them connected to land pushbacks in Evros, which are all pending before the Court. A number of 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.93 In 2023, 39 individual pushbacks, whose victims were represented by GCR, have been also recorded in the Mechanism for Recording Incidents of Informal Forced Returns of the National Human Rights Commission, of which GCR is a member. Since 17 July 2023, the wildfires of Evros94 that were burning in different areas for more than two weeks created a dangerous environment also for asylum seekers that arrived in Greece in the same period. According to the Human Right Watch Report on Greece of 2024, “[a]t least 20 asylum seekers reportedly died, including two children, during major forest fires in the Evros region in August, highlighting an additional risk to people on the move who are already facing violent pushbacks by authorities and attacks by vigilantes”.95 In Application no. 32629/23 - A.H. v. Greece and 8 other applications,96 in which GCR submitted an application for interim measures that were granted on 28/8/2023, 9 Afghan applicants (including 5 unaccompanied minors, one only 9 years old) remained in a forest area near the wildfires in Evros region for five days.97 The applicants went missing while the decision of the Court was pending and up to now GCR has no news or indications about the circumstances under which they disappeared. Greek Authorities replied that the applicants have not been located. In its annual review of Greece for of the events of 2023, Human Rights Watch stated that “during 2023, abuses against asylum seekers and migrants continued, including violent pushbacks, abuses in detention, and vigilante violence. The government also smeared and judicially harassed civil society groups working with asylum seekers and migrants”.98 In a report published on 14 July 2023, a Working Group of the United Nations General Assembly flagged that it “…received information concerning allegations that migrants in camps located in the Evros region had been hired as a form of private security and deployed in violent pushback operations. The Working Group is concerned about those allegations and urges the relevant authorities to investigate them. The 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 Note: The term “written intervention” refers to a document that the lawyers of the asylum seeker(s) are preparing, undersigning and then sending to the competent authorities, after communication with the represented persons in need of humanitarian assistance and international protection. It usually contains personal information of the asylum seekers and information that could facilitate locating of the person. Rule 39 requests listed by respondent State processed by the Court in 2021, 2022 and 2023, available at: https://bit.ly/4anePEU. GCR, At Europe’s Borders: Between Impunity and Criminalization, 2 March 2023, available in Greek at: https://bit.ly/42pxqLJ. BVMN, Fires, Pushbacks and the Far Right: Misplaced Blame and the Mobilisation of Violence Against People on the Move in Evros, Joint Statement of 24 August, 2023, available at: https://bit.ly/3xmeKmm. Human Rights Watch, Greece: Events of 2023, 2024, available at: https://bit.ly/3U4Qf5P. GCR Information note, case number 30. PRAB Report, September 2023, available at: https://bit.ly/3J8QmqK. Human Rights Watch, Greece: Events of 2023, 2024, available at: https://bit.ly/3U4Qf5P. 41