Europe’s most senior human rights official has said there is evidence of asylum seekers being forcibly expelled at EU borders, as he urged mainstream politicians not to give in to .

The commissioner for human rights at the , Michael O’Flaherty, told the Guardian he was concerned about the treatment of asylum seekers at the EU’s external borders in Poland and Greece, as he warned against a “securitisation response” that goes too far.

O’Flaherty described the actions of Belarus as deplorable and unacceptable, but “the securitisation response by the neighbouring countries goes too far”.

“The willingness to shut down any possibility of asylum is a violation of law, the willingness to return people across a border at risk of persecution is a violation of international law,” he said. “And it’s not necessary, because the numbers that are being intercepted at the fences are modest.”

 over the EU’s eastern land border (which includes Ukraine) in 2024, the EU border agency, Frontex, reported.


*People from the Middle East and elsewhere face members of the Belarusian military at the Belarus-Poland border near Grodno in 2021. Photograph: Oksana Manchuk/AP*

O’Flaherty has also concluded there is “compelling evidence” of “summary returns” across Greece’s land border with Turkey and from the islands. On a visit to Greece earlier this month, he met officials to discuss the Adriana shipwreck of June 2023, when more than 700 people drowned after a crowded boat carrying people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt sank in the Peloponnese.

Human rights NGOs that  accused Greek authorities of failing to mobilise “appropriate resources for a rescue” and of ignoring offers of assistance from Frontex.


*People from the Middle East and elsewhere face members of the Belarusian military at the Belarus-Poland border near Grodno in 2021. Photograph: Oksana Manchuk/AP*

O’Flaherty said he understood from his meetings that Greece’s ombudsman was “calling for a criminal investigation of specific individuals working for the state”. He added that it was very important that “Greece carefully consider his report and take the necessary prosecutorial action”.

There is an increasingly hardline response to migration in Europe, with growing interest in processing asylum claims elsewhere, such as Italy’s agreement with Albania and the previous British government’s Rwanda deal, now cancelled. Last October, EU leaders .

O’Flaherty, who was director of the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency, said any external centres had to guarantee certain red lines on human rights: the right to claim asylum and appeal against a decision; “appropriate reception conditions”; no detention of children; and ensuring people would not be returned to a country where they risked persecution.

The Irish human rights lawyer, who began his career at the UN in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993, said it was “the most challenging time for the protection of human rights” he had seen in his working life.

While he said there had always been “deeply disturbing levels of human rights violation and abuse”, the last decade had seen a repudiation of human rights by some leaders and regimes. And since 2024, he said, centrist politicians were also willing to suspend or ignore human rights obligations, particularly concerning asylum rights.

“Centrist politicians are saying things that would have been unacceptable a very short time ago, and that worries me, because if I can mangle a quotation from the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, when ”

He said, referring to migration, that moderate political leaders across  needed “to stand up for human rights” and not concede “own goals” to populists or “instrumentalising neighbouring states”.


*People from the Middle East and elsewhere face members of the Belarusian military at the Belarus-Poland border near Grodno in 2021. Photograph: Oksana Manchuk/AP*

O’Flaherty has also concluded there is “compelling evidence” of “summary returns” across Greece’s land border with Turkey and from the islands. On a visit to Greece earlier this month, he met officials to discuss the Adriana shipwreck of June 2023, when more than 700 people drowned after a crowded boat carrying people from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt sank in the Peloponnese.
```