Hope Barker
This month the NGO Border Violence Monitoring Network published a
Black Book of Pushbacks, commissioned by the United Left group of the European Parliament. The book represents the most comprehensive repository of evidence to date, containing a total of 892 group testimonies detailing the experiences of more than 12,600 people on the move who were pushed back both in border areas and deep inside European territory.
While these numbers appear shocking at first sight, they only refer to the interviews undertaken by BVMN a glimpse of a much larger and more far-reaching phenomenon. In spite of the 1,500 pages of documented evidence, which couples hard data (timings, geolocations, dates, officer and vehicle descriptions, medical reports and other corroborating evidence) with narrative accounts of pushback incidents, the official line of member states’ governments is point-blank denial.