A Turkish asylum seeker and pushback victim has won a legal battle against the Greek government after taking her case to the European Court of Human Rights.
The landmark victory announced Tuesday concerns Ayşe Erdoğan, a 34-year-old maths graduate, who was 'pushed back' to Turkey from Greece in 2019. There she faced persecution and imprisonment over alleged links to the Gülen movement, which Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, holds responsible for a coup attempt in 2016. This event triggered a mass crackdown of dissidents in the country that continues to this day.
The ECtHR, which first heard the case in June 2024, condemned Athens for the young woman’s illegal detention and subsequent pushback; for failing to conduct an effective criminal investigation; and for archiving her criminal complaint despite there being enough evidence to warrant further investigation.
The Strasbourg court ruling also acknowledged, for the first time, the “systematic practice of ‘pushbacks’ by the Greek authorities of third-country nationals from the Evros region to Turkey.”
Ayşe, an aspiring maths teacher, told openDemocracy she was "relieved" that she was able to "finally prove" she had been detained by Greek authorities and pushed back to Turkey.
"I was in Greek police custody, but I felt like I could only whisper this truth because it was being denied by the Greek authorities,” she said.
“They never registered me at the police station, which is the reason my twin brother couldn't find me."
Ayşe said that with this ruling the "truth" has finally been heard.
"I am no longer whispering, but shouting out loud: 'I suffered major repercussions of a brutal pushback.' It's a great feeling to be able to prove what really happened," she said.
Ayşe said the trauma she endured over the past five years has been difficult to process.
"I started that journey in 2019 with the hope of freedom and of reuniting with my twin brother, Ihsan,” she said.
“But these hopes were replaced with dark clouds. Now though, I can see the sun for myself.”
She added: “I hope and pray that no other human being will ever be inhumanely pushed back again.”
Flight, arrest, punishment
Ayşe graduated from university in June 2016. The coup attempt took place the following month. By November that year, she was caught up in a wave of arrests targeting alleged members of the Gülen movement, which the Turkish government formally declared a terrorist organisation.
Turkey’s Justice Minister Yılmaz Tunç announced in July 2024 that Ankara had investigated more than 700,000 people in Turkey since the coup for possible links to the movement. More than 125,000 people have been convicted, he stated.
But the Turkish government has still not disclosed the total number of terror-related investigations. Rights groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have reported that the post-coup crackdown targeted dissidents from diverse backgrounds, including Kurdish politicians, journalists, academics and independent voices critical of the government. They have denounced the Erdogan administration for exploiting arbitrary terror rulings to "target civil society."
In the aftermath of the abortive coup, President Erdogan imposed a two-year state of emergency during which the country partially withdrew from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – a move condemned by multiple rights groups.
Ayşe was accused of being a member of the Gülen movement, for depositing money in Bank Asya – which was affiliated with the group and later shut down; for participating in events organised by the Gülen movement and for using the encrypted messaging application ByLock.
She was subsequently imprisoned in November 2016. Ayşe was released in March 2019 under judicial control pending further trial over terrorism charges at Turkey’s Supreme Court of Cassation. If convicted at this trial, she was to face further imprisonment – which she later did.
Unable to legally exit the country, she crossed the Evros River into Greece on 4 May 2019 to escape further persecution. After arriving with two other companions at a small town in northeast Greece, she sent photo and video selfies to her brother Ihsan to prove they had made it.
She was stripped of her possessions and “violently” taken in a lorry back to the Greece-Turkey border with other asylum seekers
Ayşe said that she and her companions were detained and hidden by Greek police after they presented themselves to a police station in Neo Cheimonio to seek international protection. Their existence was denied to Ihsan when he tried to find her, leading him to raise the alarm with the Greek Council for Refugees. GCR lawyers appealed to both police and local authorities, but they were also told that no one by the name of Ayşe Erdoğan had been to the police station.
Ihsan told openDemocracy that while he was working to locate his sister in Greece, he received a phone call from his family in Turkey. They informed him that she had been arrested on 5 May by Turkish authorities in northwestern Turkey.
Recalling the sequence of events that led to this, Ayşe told openDemocracy that after she had been detained by Greek police, she was stripped of her possessions and “violently” taken in a lorry back to the Greece-Turkey border with other asylum seekers. She said the Greek coastguard then pushed them back across the river in an inflatable boat to Turkey where she was arrested again –this time by the Turkish authorities.
Ayşe was then summoned to court where she was convicted of terrorism charges and imprisoned in Turkey until her release on 14 October 2021. During this time, GCR filed a complaint about the pushback and represented Ayşe before the Greek courts. Her case was dismissed on grounds that "Greece does not conduct pushbacks.”
The case was later escalated to the ECtHR, where lawyers argued that Athens had violated the European Convention on Human Rights. This led to Tuesday's landmark ruling in which Greece was found guilty of illegally sending Ayşe back to Turkey to face political persecution – and for failing to conduct an effective criminal investigation into the matter. The court ruled that Greece must pay €20,000 in compensation to Ayşe as a victim of pushback.
Ayşe’s lawyer, Klotildi Prountzou, told openDemocracy: "This ECtHR ruling confirms that the criminal procedure in Greece related to pushback cases does not constitute an effective legal remedy."
Pushbacks: as illegal as they are common
GCR says that it has legally represented 5,019 asylum seekers in 749 different cases since 2022 to prevent pushbacks and guarantee their access to asylum procedures in Greece. These cases have involved people from Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Turkey, Yemen, Iran and Somalia. Some have been children.
But despite numerous reports from human rights groups and media organisations over the years, Athens continues to deny the existence of pushbacks. And in general, is allowed to engage in this illegal behaviour with impunity.
The ECtHR also heard a second, pushback-related case in June last year. This concerned a 15-year-old Afghan boy allegedly abandoned at sea by the Greek coastguard. Unlike Ayşe’s case, it was dismissed on Tuesday.
The boy, known as GRJ, had fled through Iran to Turkey in 2018 to escape persecution by the Taliban. He and 18 other migrants took an inflatable boat to the Greek island of Samos in September 2020, where they applied for asylum. GRJ claims that, on the following day, he was forced onto a raft by the Greek coastguard and left to drift in the Aegean Sea before being rescued by the Turkish sea police.
In their ruling, ECtHR judges acknowledged the "systemic practice of pushbacks from the Greek islands to Turkey". But they concluded that GRJ had "failed to provide prima facie evidence" of his presence in Greece and pushback to Turkey. Additionally, they said his "statements and allegations appeared contradictory and inconsistent at times."
The outcome was described as "shocking" by GRJ's legal representative Dr Niamh Keady-Tabbal, from the Irish Centre for Human Rights.
"For years, Greek authorities have obstructed justice by confiscating phones, failing to record apprehensions, falsely labelling pushbacks as 'prevention of departure,' and tampering with or erasing key records,” she told openDemocracy.
“Yet, rather than holding Greece accountable for its failure to investigate these practices or properly recognising the imbalance in access to evidence, I fear that the Court may be giving a dangerous green light to Greece's ongoing denial strategy."
Keady-Tabbal said the ECtHR's ruling was also questionable because GRJ had submitted visual evidence of his presence in Samos and further evidence attesting to expulsion from Greece.
"His presence at the refugee camp in Samos was also corroborated by accounts from the UNHCR," she added.
"What can be accepted as prima facie evidence? Do asylum seekers need to anticipate pushbacks in advance, in order to later access justice for the human rights violations they are subjected to?"
The outcome of Ayşe Erdoğan’s case suggests that this might well be the case.
Her brother, Ihsan, told openDemocracy that he had already anticipated the high probability of Ayşe being pushed back to Turkey. This is what prompted him to proactively share visual evidence of her presence in Greece with lawyers and journalists, aiming to prove she was there and prevent her from being illegally sent back.
He added: "There were literally dozens of daily pushback cases in the region. So I thought sharing this evidence would prevent [Ayşe] from experiencing the same fate. But I was wrong, because it still didn't save my sister from a violent pushback and inhumane treatment."
