The lawyer for a French-Turkish woman who filed a case against Greece at the European Court of Human Rights says she was a victim of racial discrimination. RenataBritoAP has the story.
In court documents seen by The Associated Press, the 32-year-old woman, who has Turkish as well as French citizenship, claims she and her husband were trying to flee Turkey to escape prison sentences that were politically motivated.
Greek authorities did not respond to multiple requests for comment sent by the AP to the Ministry of Migration and Asylum, the Ministry of Citizen Protection and the Greek Embassy in Paris. However, Greece released a statement Thursday evening after aalleged a separate pushback involving two asylum-seekers later found dead on the Aegean coast.
The French woman’s story is laid out in court statements from her, her husband and her sister, including illustrations she did from prison. The AP also drew on interviews in Paris with the sister and one of the woman’s lawyers; documents including her French passport, French national ID and French marriage papers; emails, call logs, and screen shots of texts and GPS data the woman shared in real time with a lawyer.
The woman’s family trusted that once she stepped foot in Greece, a European Union country and part of the Schengen area, Europe’s visa-free travel zone, she would be safe. As the couple crossed Greece’s eastern border on the morning of Oct. 19, 2021, her family anxiously awaited news from their home 90 km outside Paris. They followed the woman’s movements on a real-time location tracking app.Her family proceeded to contact both French and Greek authorities, saying the couple needed help.
Meanwhile, in France, her family had lost contact with her and was getting increasingly worried. Her sisters scrambled to call and email both Greek and French authorities. “We continued to beg them not to send us back, explaining to them I was French and that we were persecuted in Turkey,” she says in her statement.
Catherine Briddick, a lecturer in International Human Rights and Refugee Law at Oxford University, said the woman’s case “shows the absurdity of Fortress Europe.”
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