Migration and Fundamental Rights Bulletin - 1/2026
Serious rights violations at borders persist and accountability remains low. Credible reports of violent summary returns at the EU’s external land and sea borders continue. Although more reports of serious rights violations are investigated, gaps regarding promptness and effectiveness of investigations lead to a perception of impunity, which risks undermining the rule of law. FRA suggests in its 2024 guidance on investigating alleged ill-treatment at borders ways to strengthen investigations. A year later, FRA finds in its follow-up publication on Investigating alleged ill-treatment at the European Union’s external borders – 2025 update that such violations still often go unreported and are insufficiently investigated.
According to data FRA received from IOM’s Missing Migrants Project – in 2025, 32 people were reported dead or missing at the Belarus-EU borders. On the Western Balkan route, at least 22 people died or went missing. These data cover fatalities per route and include also those incidents that occurred outside the EU.
In future, new challenges may emerge. The five EU Member States bordering Belarus and the Russian Federation declared their withdrawal from the 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction. The corresponding notifications justify the withdrawal on the basis of the deteriorated security situation.
Allegations of ill-treatment, summary returns and excessive use of force persist, as a civil society 2025 annual report on pushbacks reminds.
On the Eastern Mediterranean route, in Greece, the recording mechanism by the National Commission for Human Rights documented a “pattern of organised and structural violations of human rights and of the principle of non-refoulement”. Its latest annual report (July 2025), which presents data collected in 2024, recorded 52 summary return incidents, 35 in the Evros region and 17 at sea. These incidents concerned at least 1,517 people, including at least 300 women and 225 children. Two out of three incidents at the land border in Evros and half of the incidents at sea, involved violence. At sea, 24% of the incidents involved life-endangering conduct.
In Cyprus, in March 2025, UNHCR issued a statement concerning the interception at sea of three boats with some 80 Syrian nationals, followed by disembarkation in Syria. The Cypriot authorities denied the allegations.
Along the Balkan route, in 2025, the tri-partite monitoring mechanism in Bulgaria, recorded some 214 summary returns affecting 6,117 individuals compared to 3,549 incidents in 2024, affecting 43,284 individuals, according to UNHCR. UNHCR’s own monitoring work indicate that 17% of asylum applicants interviewed in Bulgaria were prevented from entering the territory of Bulgaria. Among those whose entry was prevented, 57% reported use of violence. In November 2025, investigating a serious incident, the Frontex fundamental rights officer (FRO) noted delays, misleading information, and possible negligence in relation to an operation where three children died from hypothermia near the Turkish border in December 2024.
The Croatian Ombudswoman (see annual report for 2024, page 170) continued to receive allegations of rights violations at borders and informed FRA that several investigations are ongoing, including one examining alleged police violence at the border. According to a Save the Children report (November 2025), summary returns persist, with testimonies consistently describing intimidation and physical abuse.
In September 2025, the Hungarian Helsinki Committee marked the 10-year anniversary of the fence at the border with Serbia and, in its submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture reiterated that collective expulsion of migrants and related inhuman and degrading, continue.
The Member States at the border with Belarus publish data on third-country nationals prevented from irregular entry. For 2025, these concerned some 12,046 people in Latvia, some 1,652 people in Lithuania and some 25,114 in Poland (at Table 3). Data include people stopped before physically crossing the border as well as people reconducted at the border after apprehended inland (see section 5).
In their annual reports covering 2024, the national Ombuds institutions flag the fundamental rights concerns of such summary returns (e.g. the 2024 Lithuanian annual report, pages 122-129 and the 2024 Polish Commissioner for Human Rights annual report, page 17). In October 2025, the Polish Commissioner addressed a letter to the Ministry raising his concerns about the restrictions to asylum.
To prevent risks of refoulement, in Poland the ECtHR granted interim measures in 114 cases, representing 76 % of the court’s interim measures relating to borders in 2025. Authorities do not always comply with them, as a case by the Association for Legal Intervention shows.
Next to the uncontrolled violence on the Belarusian side of the border, reports by Save the Children (September 2025) and by Oxfam and Egala (March 2025) describe violent summary returns from Poland, sometimes from hospitals, leaving people in the border area without water, food or healthcare. Civil society organisations supporting people on the move, such as “I Want to Help Refugees” (Gribu palīdzēt bēgļiem) in Latvia, the Sienos Grupė in Lithuania and the Polish NGO, We Are Monitoring (Stowarzyszenie) continue to report alleged rights violations at the Belarus border.
In Spain, the Superior Court of Justice of Andalucia, Ceuta and Melilla, ruled illegal the immediate return in March 2025 of three migrants attempting to swim to Ceuta (decision No. 290/2025decision No. 290/2025). The same Court ruled in November 2025 that the immediate return to Morocco of six Syrian migrants who arrived in the Chafarinas Islands and requested asylum, violated asylum rights and procedural guarantees (decision No. 2434/2025). The Court held that the special border regime of Ceuta and Melilla cannot be extended to Chafarinas, requiring instead an individualised return or asylum process.
In Mayotte, a French overseas department, media investigations (2025) raised alarms about dangerous maritime interception practices by French authorities that have led to migrant deaths.
FRA’s 2025 update on investigations into alleged ill-treatment at the EU’s external borders finds that, between 2020 and 2024, at least 135 criminal and 161 disciplinary investigations were opened in 13 Member States, resulting in 4 criminal convictions and 13 disciplinary sanctions.
In Italy, the Tribunal of Crotone initiated judicial proceedings over the February 2023 Cutro shipwreck with six officials on trial since January 2026. In Greece, two years after the Pylos shipwreck, criminal proceedings have been initiated against 17 members of the Hellenic Coast Guard, including senior officers. After that incident in 2023, a FRA report on death at sea (2023) called for effective investigations.
National human rights institutions also investigate cases. For example, the Polish Ombudsperson is examining a case from 10–11 July 2025 in which a soldier allegedly used rubber bullets and struck an Afghan national with a rifle butt. The individual was hospitalised in Białystok. The Lithuanian Ombudspersonconducted two investigations in 2025, relating to allegations of refoulement at border crossing points (cases no. 5D-2025/2.1-389 and 5D-2025/2.1-465).
Calls for effective investigations into incidents continue. For Greece, in February 2025, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights issued a memorandum on migration and border control, recommending stronger accountability mechanisms. On 3 February 2026, after a vessel collided with a Hellenic Coast Guard ship near Chios, resulting in 15 fatalities, the Greek National Commission for Human Rights called for an urgent and thorough investigation into the incident. Subsequently, Greek authorities opened an inquiry. In his capacity as the National Mechanism for the Investigation of Arbitrary Incidents, the Greek Ombudsman stated that he will closely monitor the conduct of the investigation and assess its completeness upon its conclusion. According to the Greek Ombudsman annual report of 2025, reported misconduct cases increased by 53%, reaching a total of 272 compared to the previous year.
In A.R.E. v. Greece and in G.R.J. v. Greece (2025), it noted Greece’s “systematic practice” of summary returns at its sea and land borders, finding a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in the first of the two cases. In Almukhlas and Al Maliki v. Greece (2025), it condemned Greece over the death of an Iraqi child in 2015 near the island of Symi, shot by a coastguard during an interception. It found that Greece failed to protect the right to life and that subsequent investigations were inadequate, breaching Article 2 of the ECHR.
More generally, the ECtHR has issued several decisions concerning events at the EU’s external borders. In Y.K. v Croatia (2025), the Court found that Croatia violated the applicant’s rights by detaining him, preventing his access to the asylum procedure, and expelling him despite a risk of renewed torture. The Court observed that without legal representation and an automatic suspensive effect on appeals, the applicant couldn’t effectively challenge his expulsion decision (paras. 124-132). A few months later, the ECtHR ruled in H.Q. v. Hungary (2025), that Hungarian authorities unlawfully expelled asylum seekers to Serbia without an adequate individual assessment. Over 30 cases remain pending before the ECtHR, including three cases on instrumentalisation and push backs referred to the Court’s Grand Chamber relating to the situation in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland described in section 3.2.2.
At the EU level, the Frontex Fundamental Rights Office informed FRA that from January 2024 to June 2025, it concluded 69 serious incidents reports alleging fundamental rights violations in Frontex operational activities. It found that in 53 cases fundamental rights were likely violated or that there was strong evidence regarding violations of fundamental rights. It referred these cases to national authorities for investigations under domestic law. By March 2026, none of these cases resulted in disciplinary or criminal sanctions, although some investigations remain pending.
