NGOs report shed light on pushbacks at Lithuania Border

A recent report “Pushed, Beaten, Left to Die” has revealed that over 120,000 pushbacks were recorded at the EU’s borders in 2024, including almost 20,000 at the eastern borders. According to the report by nine NGOs, including ECRE member organisations the Hungarian Helsinki Committee and the Center for Peace Studies (CMS), many of the pushbacks involved violence, with people on the move being beaten, robbed and abandoned in dangerous conditions that sometimes resulted in death. The report also reveals that 13,600 pushbacks were recorded in Poland, 5,388 in Latvia and 1,002 in Lithuania. Its authors were highly critical of the attitude of both the European Commission (EC) and EU member states (MS) to the well-documented pushbacks at the EU’s borders. They called for immediate action from the EC, EU MS and the European Border and Coast guard Agency (Frontex), in order to stop what they describe as the “troubling normalisation of pushbacks and a retreat from the EU’s commitments to human rights”.