“[T]he executive director of Frontex has said that he expects all these recommendations to be implemented. Otherwise, he would consider reducing or cutting funding for co-financed assets,” said Chris Borowski, spokesman for the EU border agency Frontex. Those co-financed assets refer to a number of Greek coast guard vessels.
Officials from the Greek coast guard and Greek government did not respond to a request for a comment.
In January 2025, the European Court of Human Rights found Greek authorities guilty of conducting systematic pushbacks of migrants, and violating human rights law in the process. The EU has previously called on Greece to investigate allegations of migrants being abandoned at sea and deportations by its authorities.
“We are now putting fundamental rights at the heart of these negotiations. In the past, this discussion happened towards the end of the negotiations, so they were kind of a secondary issue, but now they’re really the core of these negotiations,” said Borowski.
In 2023, hundreds of migrants were thought to have died at sea when a fishing boat sank off the coast of Greece’s southern peninsula while trying to reach Europe from Libya. Greek Ombudsman Andreas Pottakis set up an independent investigation into the shipwreck, after the Hellenic coastguard explicitly refused to conduct its own despite pressure from Frontex. The independent investigation recommended disciplinary action for eight Hellenic coast guards involved in the incident.
Frontex Fundamental Rights Officer Jonas Grimheden then recommended temporarily suspending the agency’s activities in Greece.