Over 120,000 migrant pushbacks recorded at EU borders in 2024, say NGOs

According to a recent report by nine NGOs, including We Are Monitoring Association (Poland), Mission Wings Foundation (Bulgaria) and the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, at least 120,457 pushbacks were carried out at the European Union’s borders in 2024. This, according to the NGOs, prevented the individuals concerned from applying for asylum.

Pushbacks are illegal under the principle of non-refoulement enshrined in Article 33 of the Geneva Convention on Refugee Law: “No Contracting State shall expel or return (“refouler”) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”

The activists collected data on pushbacks from NGO reports, research groups, and government services. The figure only concerns pushbacks that occurred in a European country to third countries and does not consider expulsions within the EU’s internal borders. The report also notes that many people “are pushed back on multiple occasions at different moments.”

Bulgaria tops the ranking of EU pushbacks

Bulgaria tops the ranking of EU states that push back the most migrants, according to the report. The authorities in Sofia in 2024 carried out 52,534 pushbacks to Turkey.

The high ranking is partially explained by the fact that Bulgaria became a full member of the Schengen zone on January 1, 2025. Border security issues were among the main concerns that delayed Bulgaria’s entry into the Schengen area; Austria and the Netherlands initially vetoed its membership. The southern European country is therefore under intense pressure from other EU member states to manage migration flows.

Reports of pushbacks in Bulgaria have been increasing in recent months. InfoMigrants met a group of four young Moroccans in the small town of Svilengrad last June, near the border with Turkey. Amine*, 24, said he had been pushed back five times. The others, aged 22 to 30, experienced two, sometimes three pushbacks. During these deportations, “the police took our phones, our belongings, our money, every time,” said Amine. “They also took our clothes and shoes”.

The accounts of exiles also testify to the violence perpetrated by the authorities. Asylum seekers have been “forced to swim back to Turkey”, forcibly stripped, or bitten by the dogs kept by the Bulgarian guards. NGOs have condemned these violations of human rights on numerous occasions, which even the EU’s border agency, Frontex, tends to overlook, according to an investigation by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN).

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Pushbacks often lead to tragedy. At least 93 people died in 2022 and in 2023 on their way through Bulgaria, according to research by the ARD studio in Vienna in cooperation with Lighthouse Reports and several other media outlets.

Two activist groups, the Balkan Route Collective (Colletivo rotte balcaniche) and No Name Kitchen (NNK) accused Bulgarian authorities in early January 2025 of being responsible for the deaths of three Egyptian migrants. These exiles, aged 15 to 17, were found frozen to death in the Bulgarian forest, a few kilometers from the Turkish border. “The lack of help from the authorities and their systematic obstruction of the rescue operations carried out by the activists led to the deaths of the teenagers,” said the activists.

The Bulgarian border police denied all allegations of deliberate negligence and claimed to have “reacted immediately to all signals received, but the alerts of December 27 contained erroneous or misleading information”.

The Bulgarian government usually denies practicing “pushbacks”, according to the French newspaper Le Monde. Ivaylo Tonchev, one of the heads of the Bulgarian border police, defended himself in 2023 against the accusations of the NGOs. “There is no violence against migrants,” he told Euronews. “The only cases where physical force is used are in accordance with our country’s legislation. .. But there are aggressive groups of migrants who throw stones at us and our vehicles from Turkish territory,” he said.

Greece condemned by the ECHR

Greece pushed back 14,482 people from its borders in 2024, making the second country after Bulgaria that commits the most pushbacks, according to the NGO report. Athens has been accused for years of violent pushbacks in the Aegean Sea and near the Evros River.

InfoMigrants has collected many accounts from migrants who said they were victims of such expulsions. Samuel*, an African, filmed and recounted his pushback to InfoMigrants in May 2020. The young man explained how the Greek coast guard spotted him at night as his boat approached the island of Lesbos. “The coast guard asked us to give them our can of gasoline. Then they threw us a rope. We thought they were towing us to Lesbos, but in fact they took us to the middle of the sea. They left us there and set off again.”

A few months later, in December 2020, InfoMigrants published a similar account from a 17-year-old Guinean, who described how Greek coast guards had pierced the front of his dinghy in the Aegean Sea. InfoMigrants even met a retired Greek police officer in 2021, who confirmed the existence of pushbacks in the Evros River, between Turkey and Greece. “Pushbacks exist, I myself have sent 2,000 people back to Turkey,” he said on the condition of anonymity.

In May 2023, an incriminating video published by the New York Times showed the Greek coast guards abandoning migrants at sea, in Turkish territorial waters.

That same year, the NGO Doctors without Borders (MSF) stated in a November report that illegal pushbacks of migrants had “become the norm”, highlighting “the glaring lack of protection for people seeking safety in Greece”.

A BBC investigation in June 2024 alleged that the Greek coast guard caused the deaths of over 40 people over a three-year period by forcing them out of Greek territorial waters. There were nine migrants among the over 40 people who drowned after being deliberately thrown into the water, according to the BBC.

In a landmark ruling in January, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) found Greece guilty of illegally deporting a Turkish woman to Turkey. The woman was deported the same day she arrived in Greece, and later arrested and imprisoned by the Turkish authorities. The ECHR ordered Greece to award her 20,000 euros in damages.

Despite the accumulating evidence, Athens has never acknowledged the existence of pushbacks and has always denied carrying them out.

Other EU states might receive similar sentences soon. The ECHR began examining three cases in early February against Poland, Latvia and Lithuania concerning allegations of pushbacks to Belarus.

Contacted by InfoMigrants, the European Commission said that it was “up to the Member States to manage and protect their external borders within the EU legal framework”, and it is their “responsibility to investigate any allegations of wrongdoing”.

“In the context of our border management activities, Member States must ensure that their obligations under European and international law are respected, including the protection of fundamental rights”, a spokesperson for the European Commission wrote.

An increase in interceptions off of the Libyan coast

After Bulgaria and Greece, the “champions” of pushbacks, Poland (13,600 pushbacks), Hungary (5,713), Latvia (5,388), Croatia (1,905) and Lithuania (1,002) follow them in the list. Several of these countries accuse Belarus of attempting to destabilize Europe with migrant influxes, and therefore legalized pushbacks at their borders in recent years, defying international law.

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The report also covers Lebanon and Libya because the interceptions at sea were carried out with the “direct and extensive” support of Italy, Cyprus and more generally European authorities. Some 21,762 interceptions took place last year in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Libya, compared to 17,000 in 2023.

The EU signed an agreement with Libya in 2017 to prevent migrants from crossing the Mediterranean Sea and reaching Italy. Through this partnership, which is constantly renewed, Europe granted Libyan authorities the responsibility of coordinating rescues off its coasts. Italy also equips and trains the Libyan coast guard to intercept migrants in the Mediterranean Sea.

This controversial deal is regularly denounced by NGOs and international bodies, due to the threats and intimidation of Libyan authorities at sea against migrants and humanitarian workers.

When they are intercepted at sea and returned to Libyan soil, migrants are transferred to detention centers managed by the Department for the Fight against Illegal Immigration (DCIM), where they are subjected to torture, sexual violence, extortion, and forced labor.

Pushbacks, ‘a systematic practice’ within the EU

The increase in pushbacks observed at Europe’s external borders “have become a systematic practice across the EU”, the NGOs believe. ” These numbers, almost certainly an underestimate, underscore the persistent violation of international and EU law.”

The humanitarians and researchers who wrote the report regret the muted reaction from European institutions, which gives free rein to the singled out countries to prevent entry, including by force.

“The European Commission, which guarantees compliance with EU treaties on asylum, condemned these practices a few years ago. We hear much less disapproval from it today; it has lost much of its influence over its members,” said Matthieu Tardis, a researcher specializing in immigration and co-director of Synergie Migrations in October.

*First name has been changed