“Return, or prison”: Inside IOM and Greece’s failing migrant return scheme

Greece’s new Minister of Migration, Thanos Plevris, has given a blunt ultimatum to those he calls “illegal migrants” in the country: “return, or prison”.

A bill presented to Greece’s parliament in July proposes to reform the country’s procedures for removing third-country nationals. It would make rejected asylum seekers liable to a criminal sentence of two to five years if they remain undocumented.

“Our goal is to expedite returns, even before the asylum process is completed,” Plevris said in early August, while touring reception camps near Athens.

The bill was proposed by Plevris’s predecessor, far-right politician Makis Voridis. During a June meeting of the committee that monitors Greece’s use of European Union funds for migration control, Voridis acknowledged the bill’s true goal.

“My objective is not to fill up jails,” he said, adding that the criminal sentence for undocumented migrants would be “suspended if they opt for going back”.

Greece’s parliament passed the bill in mid-September. It has already been used to send at least three migrants to prison.

One organisation stands to benefit from this wave of criminalisation: IOM, the UN’s migration agency. 

For more than a decade, IOM has been in charge of Greece’s Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration (AVRR) programme. But for years, despite offering migrants increasingly larger cash incentives to sign up, the agency has failed to meet its targets. 

Missed targets

IOM’s office in Greece pledged to return 16,500 people between 2019 and 2022. It only managed to return around 10,600 people, even after the programme was extended by 10 months. 

Grant agreements between IOM and the Greek Ministry of Citizen Protection show that targets for the AVRR project were revised after the project concluded to ensure its successful completion, according to analysis by The New Humanitarian.

The initial target of 16,500 returns was reduced to 12,640 in July 2021, then cut again in March 2024 to 10,920, some seven months after the project ended in August 2023. IOM’s allocated budget, however, did not suffer any downsizing.

The latest version of the scheme was launched in September 2023 with the goal of deporting some 17,000 people by the end of 2027. As of July this year, only 4,112 people had been returned – a pace that, if unchanged, will miss the target by more than 40%.

Between 2019 and 2024, IOM’s office in Greece received more than $60 million to run the AVRR scheme, according to calculations based on the agency’s public financial reports. Three quarters of this funding came from the EU, according to IOM’s website.

An IOM spokesperson told The New Humanitarian that while these figures “may suggest a slower pace, it is important to emphasise that migration patterns are neither linear nor predictable, and return numbers can fluctuate significantly due to many factors”, both in Greece and in migrants’ countries of origin.

“The project targets are directly connected with the available budget, priorities, and requirements as defined by the donor,” the spokesperson added.

They also pointed to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic – travel restrictions, suspended flights, and lockdowns – as a key factor behind the shortfalls. However, IOM’s own reporting shows that returns never stopped during the pandemic, and numbers quickly rebounded to pre-pandemic levels by August 2020 but were still not high enough to reach its targets.

AVRR programmes usually offer two forms of assistance: pre-departure financial and logistical support, and in-kind reintegration assistance in the country of origin. Only around 26% of returnees received reintegration assistance between 2016 and 2023, according to a 2025 study by Greece’s National Centre for Social Research.

According to a recent investigation by the Gambian outlet The Republic, IOM’s reintegration support for Gambian returnees was slow, poorly managed, forced beneficiaries into unsuitable work, and enabled “profiteering” by IOM-designated suppliers.

In an effort to boost sign-ups for so-called voluntary returns, Greek authorities experimented with increasing cash incentives. 

For people living on mainland Greece, the pre-departure cash grant rose from 370 euros in 2019 to 1,000 by 2021. In 2020, asylum seekers on the Aegean Islands were offered as much as 2,000 euros to drop their asylum claims and accept voluntary returns. Only 146 people took up that offer.

Katerina Rozakou, a professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University in Athens, wrote in a 2022 report that some Greek police officers consider IOM’s cash grants to be “bribes” to encourage sign-ups to the AVRR programme.

Recruiting detainees

Another IOM tactic to encourage sign-ups is recruiting migrants who may be looking for an alternative to prolonged detention.

Between 2016 and 2019, almost half of IOM’s so-called information sessions were conducted inside deportation centres and police stations. With Greece’s new deportation bill, the number of people in detention is set to rise again. This will be a boon to IOM’s programme, which will be able to offer its services to this trapped population.

The IOM spokesperson acknowledged that the agency conducts visits to detention facilities upon request by the authorities “for the provision of information and/or registration on the AVRR project”.

Hellenic Police, Greece’s national police force, runs seven deportation centres with a total capacity of 3,676 people. The Amygdaleza deportation facility in Athens hosts an “IOM section” that holds migrants who have been issued deportation orders, according to a 2018 report by the Council of Europe’s torture prevention committee. Because registering for AVRR does not suspend pre-removal detention – it only protects from imprisonment – deportees can remain locked up for months awaiting departure. 

“This seemingly paradoxical detention of people who had signed up for their return in free will further underscores the compulsory character of soft deportations,” wrote Rozakou, the Panteion University anthropologist. 

Kiran*, an asylum seeker from Pakistan, told The New Humanitarian he has spent more than three years – in three separate stints – detained in Greece’s Corinthos and Amygdaleza camps. He said IOM staff target undocumented people like him for the AVRR programme.

“Before, they were [offering it to] whoever wants to go, but now IOM makes a trap together with the officers from the Asylum Service,” he said.

According to Kiran, detainees are told by Asylum Service officers to apply for asylum to avoid forced removals. “Then IOM shows up,” he said. “People who don’t want to be forcibly deported and know that they won’t get asylum get in the programme of volunteer deportation with IOM, so they at least get some money.” 

This tactic does not always work. In Kiran’s case, the Embassy of Pakistan refused to issue him a passport, which he said is because he is ethnically Baloch. Pakistani authorities have long been accused of human rights abuses against alleged Baloch separatists.

In a similar, previously documented case, a man from Pakistan spent six months in detention awaiting a travel document after signing up to the AVRR programme, similarly to no avail.

A lack of cooperation by origin countries has been a persistent obstacle to the EU’s migration control goals, which heavily rely on IOM support. In recent years, IOM spent more than $10 million to develop the Readmission Case Management System (RCMS), a digital tool aimed at speeding up migrant removals from EU countries and, according to the agency, “potentially shortening detention times”. 

But in the three countries that first partnered with IOM to use RCMS – Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – migrant readmission rates have consistently remained below pre-RCMS levels, according to a recent investigation by The New Humanitarian.

In response to The New Humanitarian, Pakistan’s embassy in Athens did not comment on Kiran’s case but said it “provides consular services to all Pakistanis as per rules/procedures of the Government of Pakistan”.

According to Kiran, few migrants sign up for the programme. “They make fun of the minimal money they get,” he said, referring to the 1,000-euro cash grant. 

Fear of blacklisting

Since September 2023, IOM’s return programme seems to be targeting Georgian nationals in Greece, who now make up more than 80% of returnees. 

Adla Shashati, director at the Greek Forum of Migrants, said this is because many Georgians who arrived in Greece in the 2000s failed to maintain legal status in the country.

Many Georgians sign up for returns to avoid being blacklisted from entering Europe’s open-border Schengen Area, according to a Georgian community leader in Greece who spoke on condition of anonymity. Some Georgians whose returns were assisted by IOM have returned to Greece after failing to find work in Georgia.

“We would expect that IOM, at least its Greek office, would have some type of support and collaboration with the migrant organisations that are in the country and not remember us only when they have a type of returns project where they just want to send away migrants,” said Shashati.

“It’s the exact mentality that the Ministry of Migration has at the moment,” she added, “which, instead of being for migration and asylum, is a ministry of deportations.”

* A pseudonym has been used to protect the identity of an asylum seeker.

The production of this investigation is supported by a grant from the IJ4EU fund. The International Press Institute (IPI), the European Journalism Centre (EJC), and any other partners in the IJ4EU fund are not responsible for the content published and any use made out of it. Edited by Jacob Goldberg.