Moving through Europe: a reflection on the EU, borders, and community from Lesvos and beyond
- AISU Editorial
- 23 mei
- 10 minuten om te lezen
This is the private work of Elena D’Onofrio, PR-committee member of the Amnesty Student Group Utrecht (AISU), and does not represent an official Amnesty International analysis.
Recently, I went back to Lesvos. I was there previously from October to December, doing some voluntary work in a day centre for people residing in the Mavrovouni refugee camp. The island appeared at the centre of the social and political discourse surrounding the 2015 “refugee crisis” in Europe, becoming one of the migration hotspots for people seeking asylum in the EU. Its infamous Moria refugee camp, originally built to accommodate 3.000 people but housing nearly 20.000 at the time of its closure in 2020, was dubbed “a concentration camp on European soil” by the experts committee advising the UNHRC, the United Nations Human Rights Council (Pagella 2020).[1] Since then, the European border policy has significantly changed to establish a border patrol agency (now commonly known as Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency) and shift its focus on the protection of Europe’s external borders and the “security of Europe’s citizens” (European Commission, 2015. [2] As I land in Lesvos for the second time, I ask myself: security from what?
Contradictions
On the bus ride from the airport to the house I will be staying in for the next month, I pass by Plateia Sapfous, the central square of the city, facing the port and the open sea. Docked right next to the bus stop I get off at are several grey ships with “Hellenic Coast Guard” writing on the side. They are a normal sighting on the island: they come back to the Sapfous dock every morning, riddled with the horrors they committed at night but with no visible proof of it. The people driving these boats are supposed to be rescuing people at sea, in distress on the short journey between the Turkish coast and EU soil. Instead, they regularly commit pushbacks, an illegal practice where instead of rescuing people, they tow their boat back to Turkish waters and leave it to be rescued by Turkish vessels. Sometimes, they poke holes in the small dinghies, or destroy all the phones on board. Other times, they haul everyone onto Coast Guard boats, drive back to Turkish territory, and throw people on inflatable lifeboats.[3] Every time, their purpose is to stop the arrival of people in the EU, instill fear, and act as a deterrent. Every time, they are essentially leaving people to drown, at the mercy of the waves. As recently as April, a boat carrying more than 30 people sank off the northern coast of Lesvos, leaving seven people dead, including three children (Al Jazeera 2025).[4] According to initial reports from survivors of the shipwreck, the Hellenic Coast Guard poked holes in their boat with harpoons before leaving, only coming back later when people were already in the water (sources from Decriminalize.eu).[5] A 20-year old on board was arrested for steering the dinghy and charged with smuggling, even though his wife and child were among the dead. (Giannopolous 2025).[6] Getting off the bus, I look at the idyllic scene before me: the sea is calm and shimmering under the sun, surrounded by green hills ripe with the colours of spring. In the square, people are walking around with ice cream and coffee, chatting with each other about mundane things. The island is beautiful. If you didn’t know about what the coast guard does at night, what the EU allows it to do, you would never think it could hold such contradictions.
Asylum
When I go back to the day centre, I am expecting to see some old volunteer faces, but I do not expect to see so many people still waiting for a decision on their asylum application. I have been gone more than three months, and people I met back in October are still here, waiting. When I first arrived, the asylum process was relatively “fast” for the Greek bureaucratic system. Most people from Syria, Palestine, and Sudan could hope to receive a decision in around two to three months.[7] But after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December, applications from Syrian asylum seekers were paused until further notice in most European countries, leaving people stuck in a limbo, waiting even to be told no (Shankar 2024).[8] One of the boys I’d seen around the day centre in October tells me he was done with his interviews and submitted all the necessary documents and information months ago, but there is still no update on his case, and nothing he can do to speed things up. He describes feeling helpless and stuck in the camp, waiting to start “real life” while living in a cold container with 6 other boys, no hot showers, no laundry, no way to make a little money. We instantly become friends, and in the month I’m there, he still doesn’t hear anything back on his application. On my last night on the island, he tells me he’s thinking about leaving, going to his brother in Germany in another way. “Forged papers,” he says, because it’s the safest way. “If they catch you, they let you go and you can try again.” But there’s a drawback: it’s 4.000€ for a fake travel document and a slim chance of getting through border control. Still, I am relieved he wants to try this way: it seems safer than walking through the Balkans, like some of my other friends are doing.
In my first couple of days back, we get a call from them. They are in the Sarajevo camp, wanting to cross into Croatia soon but so tired from walking that they want to rest in the camp for a few days. On the call, they are laughing and joking around, showing us their beds in the camp and the crisps they bought at the corner shop. I’m relieved to see they are fine, but one of them has blistered feet and another was beaten so badly on the way that his shoulder dislocated and he’s wearing a brace. They are Iraqi and Syrian, and they left Lesvos because their applications were paused or taking too long. “We want to go, we want to start our lives, we can’t wait in this camp anymore” I remember them saying. Even if they get approved on Lesvos, they don’t want to stay in Greece, and having asylum here significantly lowers their chances of getting approved in another EU country. This is because of the Dublin Regulation, an EU convention stating that the first EU country entered by someone seeking asylum is responsible for processing their asylum request (European Commission 2020).[9] This means that “border countries” like Greece, Italy, and Spain are disproportionately responsible for handling the majority of asylum requests. Additionally,if someone is granted asylum in Greece, for example, but wants to ask for asylum in a different EU state, they then have to prove that Greece was not a safe country for them to live in. My friends want to go to Germany, or maybe the United Kingdom. On the call, they tell us they will dream of London when going to sleep. They’re young, two of them barely 20 years old. They ask us if we know any organisations that could help them once they cross into Croatia, because they don’t want to be pushed back or beaten again. They were already threatened with guns on the way to Bosnia. My friend and I spend the whole night googling, reaching out to people we know working in the field, and looking for camps and organisations on the Croatian border. They also tell us their clothes and shoes are ruined from walking in the woods for days, and there are no washing machines in the camp. I remember that someone I met here on Lesvos is working in Sarajevo, and he tells me his organisation regularly delivers shoes and clothes in the camp and around the city. Our friends have to fill out a form at 3PM the following day to qualify. We both put alarms on our phones to remember, and a couple of days later, they manage to get some extra clothes and better shoes. While this feels good for a moment, it begs the question of why them? Why do they have to walk across countries and continents, risk their health, safety and life to get somewhere I could easily get a 50€ flight to? What’s the difference between me and them except for a piece of paper that says passport on it?
Borders
Another friend of mine is not in the Lesvos camp anymore. Last I heard from him, he was in France, waiting for his asylum application to be processed. He got approved in Greece, so he was scared France would reject him. When I finally hear from him, he tells me he’s in Lyon and has applied for asylum, but he heard that a lot of people like him are not getting approved, so he wants to go to Calais to cross to the United Kingdom. He has some family there, and a friend of his recently made the crossing. This makes my heart sink. Someone I know is working in Calais, and she told me countless times about how rough it is there. There’s no official camp, so people are forced to live on the streets, with flimsy tents and no running water or toilets. Police presence is heavy in the area, and substantial funding from the UK means they are extra determined to keep people from crossing (France24 2021).[10] There is a great degree of cruelty as well: she tells me officers routinely destroy tents, burn people’s property and dismantle unofficial camping sites, sometimes every 24 hours. People can get stuck in Calais for months, sometimes even years, as sea conditions and high crossing prices by smugglers make it hard for people to make the journey. My friend doesn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag, so we arrange to get them for him. A couple of days later, he tells us he’s going to cross during the night. We check websites about sea conditions and wind strength, frantically trying to reassure ourselves that he will be fine. He doesn’t know how to swim, and smugglers charge a hefty amount for a life jacket. We don’t hear from him for hours, before he tells us he had to walk 12km in the woods and spend the night in the cold, waiting for the signal that it was safe to cross. The signal never came, and the smuggler told him to go back and that they wouldn’t cross tonight. He tells us he had to help a family with small children and he is exhausted, that he hid the tent under a bridge in Calais but he doesn’t know if he will find it again. I can’t stop thinking about how many times I crossed the Channel on the ferry when I was living in the UK, just a cheap way to get back to the Netherlands. The fact that I can’t just go there and take him to the UK with me on that ferry makes me so angry. It’s easy to direct that anger towards the smuggler, charging 2 or 3 thousand euros for an unsafe, overcrowded boat and no life jacket. But I’ve learned to direct it towards the lack of safe pathways to enter a country as an asylum seeker. Asking for asylum is protected under the Geneva Convention and it’s always legal, no matter the means of arrival in the country. The whole idea of someone entering a country “illegally” is wrong: with a Syrian passport, there is virtually nowhere to go “legally”. The Syrian passport is the worst in the world, which means an approved visa is required for a Syrian to enter almost every country (Passport Index 2025).[11] Getting a Schengen visa is basically impossible: all EU embassies and consulates in Syria have been closed for years, so people would have to leave Syria for Lebanon or Jordan in order to even start a Schengen visa application. Even then, the rejection rate is sky-high, 46% in 2023 (Global Mobility Report 2025).[12] For context, even North Koreans have more mobility. So then, what options are left to search for safety in Europe if not “illegal” ones? Per the Geneva Convention, there should be a safe pathway through which people can access the country they want to request asylum in, without walking for months, without being threatened at gunpoint, without risking their lives on unstable boats. Instead, what our money goes into is a system that systematically pushes people back, deports them, treats them like less than humans. These policies of “border protection” and “citizen security” are directly responsible for people dying on these crossings. It’s not the sea, it’s not the waves or the cold, and it’s not the smugglers who are killing people: it’s the entire border system.
[1] Pagella, Camille. 2020. “Jean Ziegler: ‘Nous Avons Recréé Des Camps de Concentration.’” Illustre. January 23, 2020. https://www.illustre.ch/magazine/jean-ziegler-avons-recree-camps-concentration.
[3] Information obtained through the Pushbacks and Border Violence presentation at the Legal Centre Lesvos. More information is available in the “Border Violence” section on their website: https://legalcentrelesvos.org/category/border-violence/.
[4]Al Jazeera. 2025. “At Least 16 Killed as Two Refugee Boats Sink off Turkiye and Greece.” Al Jazeera. April 3, 2025. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/3/at-least-16-killed-as-two-refugee-boats-sink-off-turkiye-and-greece.
[6]Giannopoulos, Bill. 2025. “Afghan National Ordered into Pre-Trial Detention as Suspected Smuggler in Lesvos Dinghy Tragedy.” Greek City Times. April 4, 2025. https://greekcitytimes.com/2025/04/05/afghan-national-ordered-into-pre-trial-detention-as-suspected-smuggler-in-lesvos-dinghy-tragedy/.
[7] Information obtained through the Applying for Asylum presentation by Fenix - Humanitarian Legal Aid. More information available on their website: https://www.fenixaid.org.
[8] Shankar, Priyanka. 2024. “Why Is Europe Pausing Syrian Asylum Claims after Al-Assad’s Fall?” Al Jazeera. December 10, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/12/10/why-is-europe-pausing-syrian-asylum-claims-after-al-assads-fall.
[9] European Commission. 2020. “Country Responsible for Asylum Application (Dublin Regulation).” Migration and Home Affairs. 2020. https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/policies/migration-and-asylum/asylum-eu/country-responsible-asylum-application-dublin-regulation_en.
[10] France24. 2021. “UK to Pay French Border Police €62.7 Million in Migrant Clampdown.” France 24. FRANCE 24. July 21, 2021. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20210721-uk-to-pay-french-border-police-%E2%82%AC62-7-million-in-migrant-clampdown.
[12] Maru, Taddele Mehari. “Global Mobility Report 2025.” Henley & Partners. 2025. https://www.henleyglobal.com/publications/global-mobility-report/2025-january/global-mobility-contradiction-schengen-visa-discrimination-numbers#:~:text=Three%20Asian%20countries%20and%20a,highest%20rejection%20rate%20at%2056.4%25.
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