“I was handcuffed, beaten, sprayed with tear gas, tortured almost to death… I want to tell my story, I want justice to be done! », says Parvin, a 30-year-old Iranian refugee, in a video presented during a videoconference organized on Wednesday February 2 by the Greek NGO HumanRights360 and the research group Forensic Architecture. The two organizations traced and documented the six illegal deportations of which the young woman was the victim at the Greek-Turkish border, based on videos, photos, GPS locations that she transmitted to them.
Between February and June 2020, Parvin, now an asylum seeker in Germany, was captured five times in the Evros border region between Greece and Turkey, and once off the island of Kos – by Greek police or masked men as the case may be – then forcibly returned to Turkey after being stripped, abused and confined for hours in containers or buildings that have nothing to do with official police stations. “Everything that happens at the border is done in secret. Normally they destroy our cell phones to leave no trace, but I managed to take some photos and videos,” says Parvin.
Held in a container
On February 18, for the first time, she tried to cross the border from the Turkish city of Edirne, in order to apply for asylum in Greece. She was quickly arrested and beaten before being pushed back, with other migrants, mostly Afghans and Iranians, on makeshift canoes on the river separating the two countries. A few days later, she tries the adventure again. This time, she was detained for several days in a container at the Soufli border post, without food or access to legal aid. Again, she is expelled to the Turkish shore. Twenty days later, a report by the Committee for the Prevention of Torture of the Council of Europe describes this same container as a place of illegal detention.
From February 28, 2020, Parvin witnessed heightened tensions between Athens and Ankara, after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan threatened to let thousands of migrants into Europe. She was sprayed with tear gas fired by Greek border guards and returned to Istanbul. During these last attempts to cross into Greece, Parvin declares having been turned back by Greek police officers accompanied by Afghan or Iranian refugees, who are helping them in the hope of not being deported.
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