Human Rights at Sea: Contemporary Challenges
View of Lesvos Image by Kostas Fotiadis
Our Legal Associate Amanda Brown, a doctoral researcher at SOAS University of London, joined the expert panel on Human Rights at Sea: Contemporary Challenges, co-hosted by the Hellenic Branch of the International Law Association and the Athens Public International Law Center.
Amanda spoke about the challenges of documenting human rights violations at sea, with a specific focus on Greece’s systematic practice of expelling asylum seekers into Turkish waters. Summary and collective expulsions, like these ‘pushback’ and ‘driftback’ operations, are explicitly prohibited under international and European law, and they also implicate numerous other human rights: the right to life, the rights to protection from torture and inhumane treatment, the right to seek international protection, and many more. Greece’s systematic practice of pushbacks across its land and sea borders has been reported for decades, which the European Court of Human Rights now recognized in January 2025.
As the panel examined contemporary challenges in protecting human rights at sea, Amanda highlighted one of the most significant obstacles: state obstruction, destruction, and confiscation of evidence. Greek authorities have long been reported to systematically prevent asylum seekers from documenting their pushbacks by seizing or destroying their phones, making it nearly impossible for survivors to retain audiovisual evidence. By design, pushback operations also leave no paper trail, allowing the government to later deny the individual's presence in Greece. Meanwhile, human rights monitors are no longer active in the Aegean Sea, after years of escalating restrictions against civil society organizations and journalists. With no independent witnesses allowed near the scene of the crime, the Greek government continues to dismiss the allegations of these human rights violations, further limiting access to justice for pushback victims and their families.
“When courts set evidentiary thresholds that are nearly impossible to meet, and without non-state actors able to monitor and document these violations, the state will continue to hold a monopoly over the truth about human rights at sea,” Amanda warned. “Impunity will remain the rule, justice the exception.”
The panel also featured expert insights from Professor Efthymios Papastavridis, Professor Sofia Galani, Dr Aphrodite Papachristodoulou, and Dr Maria-Louiza Deftou, with moderator Professor Maria Gavouneli. All the panelists are members of BlueRights, an EU COST Action research network focused on the emerging legal field of human rights at sea. To learn more about human rights at sea, follow #BlueRights on LinkedIn and stay tuned for more updates from our team at the Promise Institute Europe.
