Advocate says Greek Roma raids show wider shift in European policing
Jonathan Lee of the European Roma Rights Centre says Greece’s Operation ENTOS has targeted Roma communities through repeated raids and surveillance.
By Sofia Marchetti · World Affairs Correspondent
3 min read
Greek police operations in Roma-majority areas have become a flashpoint in a wider debate over racial profiling, public order policing and border-style enforcement inside Europe. Jonathan Lee, a Romani activist from Wales who works at the European Roma Rights Centre, says the campaign in Greece shows how governments can use security language to target minority communities.
Writing for Al Jazeera, Lee said residents of Nea Zoi, an informal neighbourhood near Aspropyrgos, have faced repeated early-morning raids involving drones, police dogs, riot police and armed officers. He said Greek authorities have presented the operations as public order measures aimed at organised crime.
According to Lee, the European Roma Rights Centre has documented at least 76 raids over six months since late 2025, involving 473 officers and affecting 152 Romani communities across Greece. The group described the campaign as the most extensive anti-Roma police operation in decades, he said.
Operation ENTOS under scrutiny
Lee identified the campaign as Operation ENTOS, a name he said means “from within.” He argued that Greek authorities avoid naming Roma directly in official police language, instead referring to “socially homogeneous groups” and “hotspots of illegality.”
That language, Lee said, allows officials to frame the operations as neutral law enforcement while concentrating police action in specific communities. He compared the approach with measures in Slovenia and Italy that he said used public order rules or security decrees in ways that disproportionately affected Roma.
Greece’s Minister of Citizen Protection, Michalis Chrysochoidis, has described the goal of Operation ENTOS as preventing and controlling criminality without accepting “special zones” outside the law, according to Lee. Lee also cited a recurring police formulation that the operations are meant to strengthen citizens’ sense of security and prevent crime.
Lee said the stated focus on crime echoes older European practices that linked Roma identity with criminality. He pointed to France’s former special ID requirements for travellers, Italy’s 2008 “Nomad Emergency,” and far-right law-and-order politics in Hungary and France as examples he sees as part of the same pattern.
Border tactics inside communities
Lee linked the Greek raids to what he described as a broader European shift in which domestic policing increasingly resembles border enforcement. He said the European Union’s Migration Pact, adopted in 2024 and implemented from June 2026, reinforces that trend by tying asylum procedures more closely to internal law enforcement.
In Lee’s account, tactics once associated with frontiers — surveillance drones, raids at dawn, police dogs and rapid displacement — are now being used in Roma-majority neighbourhoods. He also said Operation ENTOS uses “special guards” recruited from within communities to help gather information, a practice he said can divide residents.
Lee argued that framing Roma neighbourhoods as lawless areas can also support forced evictions and land clearance. He said Greek authorities have carried out repeated “clean-up” operations since the 1990s under public order arguments, including actions linked to development projects, infrastructure, sports facilities and the 2004 Athens Olympics.
Lee said there has been little international scrutiny of the Greek campaign and no significant English-language coverage before his account. He said the European Roma Rights Centre’s dataset was built from local activists’ reports and analysis of police press releases, rather than from government or international institutions.
This story draws on original reporting from Al Jazeera.