Photo: Human Rights Watch

By: Eva Kazakou

October 18th, 2025

The term “Mediterranean Migration Routes”, which appears so often in policy reports and EU documents, describes the pathways people use to cross borders, most often irregularly. As migration patterns shift over time, the map of these routes also changes. But for the past decade, three have stood out in the Mediterranean region: the Central Mediterranean, the Western Mediterranean, and the Eastern Mediterranean routes. These corridors are ranked by the EU as “high importance,” measured by the number of reported irregular crossings.

Behind this technocratic language, however, are stories of human suffering and resilience. As a PhD student focusing on border management in the Aegean Sea, I’ve been reading through cases brought before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the General Court of the European Union. These are stories of people who crossed (or tried to cross) the border. And what becomes clear is how deeply violence is woven into the European states’  border practices. The stories told in these cases are not isolated. They reveal a pattern, where structural violence (laws, policies, institutions) and interpersonal violence (use of force, neglect) converge on the most vulnerable people: children, women, gender diverse individuals and men searching for safety.

On the Eastern Mediterranaen route, in the waters between Greece and Turkey, the EU’s border regime is not only about “managing migration.” It is about life and death, violence and impunity. Below are snapshots from a few of the stories of those fortunate and privileged enough to survive and / or, somehow, be able to carry their voices over to European high courts.

Deadly Encounters at Sea

In 2015, 17-year-old Ameer Mokhlas was shot and killed during a Greek coast guard and Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, operation near the island of Symi. Almost a decade later, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Greece had violated Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to life), both through the use of force and through its failure to carry out an effective investigation. For ten years, his parents waited for this recognition, ten years in which the system seemed more concerned with protecting institutions than with grieving families.

Mokhlas’s story is not unique. Other families are still waiting. In one case, a Syrian family lost their son to coast guard gunfire in 2014; in another, a Syrian woman lost her child in a 2019 shipwreck off Kos. Both families have cases pending before the Court, alleging excessive force, negligence, and violations of the state’s duty to investigate under Article 2. Instead of investigating the role of authorities, survivors remain in a state of stagnation, waiting for answers and for justice to take its course. The violence is both direct, through shootings, negligence, and preventable deaths and structural, embedded in legal and bureaucratic frameworks that allow these deaths to go unpunished.

Pushbacks and the Denial of Asylum

Violence also takes hidden (but still violent) forms through (alleged) pushbacks. Eleven Syrians, for example, describe being detained on Crete in 2020, held without explanation, denied the chance to apply for asylum, and pushed back to Turkey in the dead of night. Their application before the EctHR, argues violations of Article 3 (prohibition of inhuman treatment) and Article 13 (lack of effective remedy), stressing that they were “returned without legal process” and left without the ability to challenge their detention. Others, an Afghan minor, several Guinean men, as well as applicants from various nationalities, have reported the same.

Here, violence appears not only physically but also through exclusion and erasure: denying people the right to speak, to seek safety, and to be heard. Instead of offering protection, pushbacks are deployed as a systematic border management tool, one that fits into a securitized approach to migration. This approach dehumanizes people seeking refuge, treating them not as humans with rights but as problems to be removed, threats to be fought.

When Accountability Fails

Even when survivors try to hold institutions accountable, the system itself shields those in power. Cases against Frontex, the EU’s border agency, highlight this impunity. Survivors and NGOs have brought forward claims of complicity in pushbacks and violations. Applicants argued that the agency should have suspended its operations in the Aegean given “serious and persistent breaches of fundamental rights”. But the General Court of the European Union dismissed the action as inadmissible, reasoning that Frontex had already “responded” and therefore could not be considered inactive, without ever examining whether rights violations had occurred.

Similar attempts for compensation related to pushbacks, were also rejected on procedural grounds. These rulings expose the legal and structural barriers that make accountability almost impossible, leaving survivors trapped in a system that documents their suffering but rarely delivers justice.

Reflection

What stands out in these cases is not only the violence itself, but also the systems and procedures that allow it to persist. A teenage boy is killed, children drown, people are expelled in the night, and still, accountability is rare. Vulnerable people, already fleeing war, persecution, or poverty, are made even more vulnerable at Europe’s doorstep. These cases remind us that the EU’s border is not a neutral line on a map. It is a site of power, exclusion, and violence, where the promise of human rights is repeatedly broken. For those of us reading these judgments safely, on dry land, the question is whether we treat them as legal battles of distant cases or as urgent and forceful reminders of the human cost of our border policies and, ultimately, of our own accountability  and complicity.

About the author

I am Evangelia (Eva) Kazakou, a third-year Ph.D. student in Political Science and Global Development Studies at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax, Canada. I completed my B.A. in International, European, and Area Studies and my M.A. in Gender, Society, and Politics at Panteion University in Athens. I’ve worked as a research assistant on the SSHRC project “Gendering Violence and Precarity in Forced Migration: Asylum-Seeking Women in the Eastern Mediterranean,” and I have been involved with Amnesty International Greece and The Greek League for Women’s Rights to address women’s rights issues in Greece.

My PhD work examines the challenges, decisions, and experiences of frontline workers implementing border management policies, while also highlighting how gender and violence impact the lives of people on the move.