From Survivors to Suspects: The Criminalisation of Migration in the Aegean - Aegean border violence patterns 2024 and 2025
This the last of four essays drawing on our new published report that examines border violence patterns on the Aegean Sea based on the Aegean Sea Border Incidents dataset and the Evidence-Based Action For Human Rights At Borders- Methodological Toolkit.
These systematically document incidents at sea using incident‑level data verified through a four‑tier system and multi‑source triangulation between official statistics, NGO documentation, media reports and IOM’s Missing Migrants Project. By including only events that could be cross‑checked across at least one credible source and classified within this verification framework, the analysis provides a conservative minimum picture of violence and obstruction in the Aegean rather than speculative or anecdotal claims. This fourth article focuses on the criminalization of migration on the Aegean Sea in 2024 and 2025.
Methodology
The methodological framework applied in this dataset was developed within Collective Aid’s Evidence‑Based Action for Human Rights at Borders project and is detailed in the Methodological Toolkit for border incidents. Every entry in the Aegean dataset represents a single border incident between 1 January 2024 and 31 December 2025, coded with variables such as location, actors involved, type of enforcement practice, people affected, children present, deaths, disappearances and criminalisation outcomes. Incidents were only included if they met the criteria of the four‑tier verification system (Single Official, Multisource Official, Single credible non‑official source, Multisource non‑official), which means much of the violence that leaves no trace in public records remains outside the dataset.
Across the two‑year period, the dataset documents 96,913 people affected by Aegean Sea border incidents including 24,876 children, again representing only those cases that could be traced and verified.
Measuring criminalisation in a two‑state enforcement system
The dataset codes for whether incidents result in criminalisation outcomes, such as arrests or prosecutions for suspected facilitation or migration‑related offences. It distinguishes between different incident types apprehensions, rescues, boat chases, shipwrecks, and records whether these ended with people being treated as victims in need of protection or as suspects in a criminal investigation. While the figures cannot capture all legal proceedings or informal punitive practices, they provide a structured snapshot of how often coercive border enforcement is followed by criminal sanctions or accusations.
Overall, the report finds that Turkey criminalised people for suspected facilitation in 18% of apprehension incidents and 5% of “rescue” operations, with 16.5% of all Turkish incidents resulting in some form of criminalisation. In Greece, the picture is even more striking: in 2024, 81.3% of boat chases and 94.7% of shipwrecks caused by the Hellenic Coast Guard resulted in criminalisation, while 53.5% of all shipwrecks in Greek waters also ended in criminal proceedings; in 2025 these percentages declined but remained high, with 66.2% of boat chases, 55.6% of HCG‑caused shipwrecks and 34.8% of shipwrecks in Greek waters leading to criminalisation.
These figures speak to an enforcement system in which violence and criminalisation operate hand in hand: people are intercepted, chased, pushed back or shipwrecked, and then investigated, detained or prosecuted rather than recognised primarily as rights‑holders in need of protection.
Criminalisation in Turkey: gatekeeping through suspicion
On the Turkish side, the dataset records that 347 apprehension incidents across the two years involved suspected facilitation, corresponding to 18% of all apprehensions. In addition, 64 Turkish Coast Guard rescue incidents, around 5% of all rescues, also resulted in suspected facilitation charges. Altogether, 411 Turkish incidents led to criminalisation, representing roughly 16.5% of all incidents involving Turkish authorities.
Testimonies cited in the report indicate that, beyond formal charges, people intercepted by the Turkish Coast Guard are routinely detained for two or three days and then released without charges. Even when proceedings do not end in long prison sentences, this short‑term detention functions as a form of punishment and control, reinforcing the message that attempts to leave Turkey irregularly will trigger a coercive response. At the same time, the focus on suspected “facilitators”, often simply the person forced to steer the boat under duress or in exchange for a reduced fee – shifts responsibility away from structural factors driving people to flee and onto individuals in precarious positions.
This pattern reflects Turkey’s role within the EU’s externalisation framework: as a gatekeeper state invested with preventing departures, it employs criminal law both to deter future crossings and to signal to EU partners that it is “combating smugglers,” even when those labelled as such are themselves protection seekers.
Criminalisation in Greece: turning survivors into defendants
The data from Greece show an even more aggressive pattern of criminalisation, particularly in relation to the most dangerous incident types. In 2024, 81.3% of boat chase incidents ended with criminalisation, meaning that in the vast majority of cases where the Hellenic Coast Guard engaged in high‑speed pursuits, those on board were later treated as suspects rather than solely as victims. The same year, an astonishing 94.7% of shipwrecks caused by HCG enforcement led to criminalisation, while 53.5% of all shipwrecks in Greek waters, regardless of direct enforcement causality, also resulted in criminal proceedings.
In 2025, these proportions declined but remained firmly punitive: 66.2% of boat chases, 55.6% of HCG‑caused shipwrecks and 34.8% of shipwrecks in Greek waters still ended in criminalisation. The report’s table on criminalisation patterns in Greece shows that, in absolute terms, hundreds of incidents over the two years involved survivors being investigated or charged following violent interceptions or life‑threatening shipwrecks.
This dynamic has profound implications. Survivors who might otherwise be key witnesses in investigating deaths, disappearances and unlawful use of force are turned into defendants facing long prison sentences for alleged smuggling or facilitation. Their credibility is attacked, their access to asylum procedures is compromised, and the structural violence of border enforcement is obscured behind a narrative of “combating criminal networks.” Meanwhile, the role of state actors and EU‑funded agencies in producing the very conditions that lead to shipwrecks and fatalities remains largely unexamined.
Criminalisation as a tool of silencing and denial
Seen alongside the findings of the previous blogposts in this series, criminalisation appears not as a side‑effect but as a core component of the Aegean border regime. People are first denied access to asylum through Turkish apprehensions, rescues and Greek pushbacks; then exposed to violent boat chases, gunfire and enforcement‑linked shipwrecks; and finally, when they survive, many are criminalised for the very journeys they were forced to undertake.
The report warns that this cycle of violence and criminalisation contributes to silencing survivors and obstructing accountability. People who fear prosecution are less likely to testify about pushbacks or abuses; those detained or deported soon after interception have little opportunity to contact lawyers, NGOs or journalists; and high‑profile smuggling trials can overshadow the systemic nature of deaths and disappearances in the Aegean. By framing migration as a matter of crime control rather than rights protection, states shift attention away from their own obligations under international refugee and human‑rights law.
Across all four blogposts, a single picture emerges from the 2024–2025 Aegean Sea Border Incidents dataset: border control in the Aegean is not a neutral exercise in managing movement but a system of coordinated state violence that systematically denies people access to asylum, concentrates lethal risk at sea and then criminalises those who survive. The evidence is incident‑level, cross‑verified and conservative, yet still devastatingly clear; what remains is for states and EU institutions to end these practices, take responsibility for the deaths and disappearances they have produced, and restore the right to seek safety without fear of being pushed back, shipwrecked or prosecuted for the act of survival itself.