Deferring to Lack of Competence: EU Looks Away as Police Continue to Raid Romani Communities in Greece
20 August 2026
On 14 August 2026, the European Commission issued a written response to a question from Green MEP Marie Toussaint. The inquiry concerned Operation ENTOS, the Greek police campaign of mass raids on Romani neighbourhoods that has been responsible for more than a hundred militarised police actions since September 2025. These police interventions often involve drones, dogs, and riot police at dawn.
The Commission's reply, delivered on behalf of Commissioner Hadja Lahbib, was five paragraphs long. It referenced the EU Roma Strategic Framework, the EU Anti-Racism Strategy, and the 2021 Council Recommendation on Roma equality, as well as promising a report before the end of 2026. It also contained the following sentence:
"The maintenance of law and order and the safeguarding of internal security are the responsibility of the Member States, and the Commission does not monitor individual police measures taken by them."
And with that, the Commission washed its hands of the matter. While the response is technically accurate in the narrowest possible sense – policing is indeed a member state competence – it assumes something it should not: that Greek authorities are capable of assessing the legality and proportionality of their own actions toward Romani people. The evidence, accumulated over decades from the European Court of Human Rights (Panayotopoulos & Others v. Greece , X v. Greece), the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI), the ERRC, and Greece's own Ombudsman, says they are not.
Once Upon a Time, When the European Commission Spoke Out
In 2010, when President Sarkozy began rounding up and expelling Romani migrants from France, the Commission found its voice. Vice-President and Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding told a press conference on 14th September that she was appalled by "a situation which gave the impression that people were being removed from a Member State of the European Union just because they belonged to a certain ethnic minority." She called it "a disgrace."
Reding's intervention, made before any legal instruments had been triggered, mattered. The Commission had prepared a letter of formal notice under Article 258 TFEU but chose not to send it. Instead, political pressure and public condemnation compelled France to modify its approach. The Commission also established a Roma Task Force on 7th September 2010 to audit how EU funds were being used for Roma integration across all member states. The Task Force published its first findings in December of that year.
Two years earlier, in 2008, when Italy announced plans to fingerprint Romani people, including children, EU Social Affairs Commissioner Vladimir Spidla told the European Parliament that fingerprinting members of one ethnic group was "not acceptable" under EU law. European Parliament lawmakers branded the action a direct act of discrimination. No infringement procedure was opened at that stage. The political condemnation alone contributed to significant pressure on the Italian government.
Between 2012 and 2013, the Commission opened an EU Pilot dialogue with Italy regarding discriminatory treatment of Roma. This is a structured mechanism that requires a member state to formally respond to specific concerns about compliance with EU law. Italy was compelled to provide written explanations. The correspondence generated through this process was later made public through access-to-documents requests.
In each of these cases, the Commission used instruments short of infringement proceedings: Public statements. Task forces. Structured dialogue. Parliamentary engagement. The Commission has a graduated spectrum of tools between doing nothing at all and launching formal legal action in the form of infringement. In 2010 it chose to use these tools. In 2026, facing a situation that the ERRC has called "the largest case of collective punishment and ethnic profiling seen in Europe for decades," it has chosen not to.
The Legal Question
The Commission's reticence in 2026 rests partly on a genuine legal difficulty that did not exist in the same form in 2010. When France expelled Romani migrants in 2010, the violation was comparatively straightforward. The Free Movement Directive (2004/38/EC) protects EU citizens who move between member states. Collective expulsions violate Article 19 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The illegality was clear.
Operation ENTOS presents a harder case. Greek police are raiding Greek Romani citizens in their own country (in ways that are almost certainly illegal under Greek laws) however, at an EU level, there are fewer laws that prohibit the actions of law enforcement. The Race Equality Directive (2000/43/EC) - which prohibits discrimination on grounds of racial or ethnic origin - covers employment, education, social protection, and access to goods and services. Policing as a public service falls outside its material scope. The Commission cannot easily build an infringement case under this directive for what Greek police are doing to Greek citizens on Greek soil.
The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights binds member states only when they are implementing Union law, as the Court of Justice of the EU has repeatedly held from Wachauf through Åkerberg Fransson. Purely domestic policing with no EU law dimension falls outside the Charter's field of application. The 2021 Council Recommendation on Roma equality, which the Commission cites in its response, is a recommendation. It is not binding and no infringement proceedings can be built on its violation. But the Commission's response treats these limitations as if they exhaust its options. They do not.
The Law Enforcement Directive
The strongest legal avenue available to the Commission runs through the Law Enforcement Directive (2016/680), which the Commission does not mention in its response to Toussaint. The Law Enforcement Directive (LED) applies to all processing of personal data by competent authorities for law enforcement purposes, regardless of whether the individuals targeted are Greek citizens or not. It applies to domestic processing with no cross-border dimension.
Article 10 of the LED governs special categories of personal data, including data revealing racial or ethnic origin. Processing such data is permitted only when "strictly necessary" for law enforcement purposes and must be subject to appropriate safeguards. Operation ENTOS involves identity checks, vehicle searches, home searches, and drone surveillance across 152 Romani-majority localities. If Greek police are systematically collecting, storing, or processing data that is based on the ethnic origin of individuals during these raids, this processing must meet the strict necessity threshold. Targeting entire neighbourhoods for data collection based on their demographic composition is arguable on its face as neither strictly necessary nor proportionate.
The Commission has opened infringement proceedings against nineteen member states for failure to transpose EU directives. It could request information from Greece on its LED compliance in the context of ENTOS. It could examine whether drone surveillance collecting personal data over Romani neighbourhoods meets the necessity and data minimisation requirements of Articles 4 and 10. Unlike previously described measures, this is a hard legal instrument, not soft law. If Greece's practices fall short, the Commission could open infringement proceedings for failure to comply with the directive.
What Soft Law Still Demands
Even where binding legal hooks are weaker, the Commission has obligations under its own frameworks. The EU Anti-Racism Strategy committed the Commission to "compile a compendium of good practices to prevent discriminatory profiling." The Commission's own 2022 study identified stop-and-search activities and use of force by police as areas where discrimination "was perceived to occur." The Commission knows this is a problem but has chosen not to apply that knowledge to Greece.
The 2026 Rule of Law Report, published on 17th July 2026, includes a country chapter on Greece that notes problems with disproportionate police checks targeting Roma. The Commission could escalate this language. It could name ethnically targeted mass police actions explicitly as a systemic concern. The upcoming implementation report on the EU Roma Strategic Framework, scheduled before the end of 2026, could include country-specific recommendations directly addressing the operation.
The Commission could open an EU Pilot dialogue with Greece requiring formal responses to specific questions, like: What is the legal basis for ENTOS? How are "socially homogeneous groups" defined operationally? Has any anti-discrimination impact assessment been conducted? What data is being collected during raids, and under what legal basis? This instrument exists precisely for situations where the Commission wishes to signal concern without committing to infringement proceedings. The Commission used it with Italy in 2008. It has not used it with Greece in 2026.
The Commission could request the EU Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) to conduct an independent field investigation into Operation ENTOS. The FRA has published guidance on preventing discriminatory ethnic profiling by police. The Commission has previously commissioned FRA research on Roma inclusion, including the EU-MIDIS surveys. A similar mandate could be issued for Greece if the Commission was serious about ethnic profiling by police as an issue of real concern for the European Union.
Commissioners could use appearances before the European Parliament's LIBE Committee to publicly question Greek practices. The European Parliament passed a resolution in September 2010 calling for a moratorium on expulsions of Roma from France. The Commission participated actively in the political dialogue surrounding that resolution. The Commission gave no indication it would involve itself in comparable parliamentary engagement regarding Greece (although that remains to be seen in upcoming sessions planned for the new parliamentary session).
A Political Choice
The legal architecture available to the Commission has expanded since 2010. The Law Enforcement Directive, the annual Rule of Law Report, and the Conditionality Regulation linking EU funds to rule of law compliance did not exist when Reding spoke. The Commission now has more instruments at its disposal, but is using fewer of them.
Human Rights Watch stated in 2024 that the European Commission has failed to take meaningful steps to hold the Greek government to account for breaches of its rule of law and fundamental rights obligations under EU law. That assessment was made before Operation ENTOS began.
In June 2026, the Roma Rights Network, a coalition of thirty-four member organisations across eighteen countries, declared that Roma rights in Europe have entered a state of acute crisis. The Commission's response to Marie Toussaint does not match the urgency of this assessment. It converts a live crisis into a bureaucratic timeline of reports, monitoring cycles, and future assessments; the kind of process language that allows institutions to appear engaged without committing to anything that creates immediate consequence.
The proposed EU budget for 2028-2034 threatens to eliminate ring-fenced support for Roma equality. The current Commission under President von der Leyen has been criticised by human rights organisations for a more cautious approach to enforcement on fundamental rights. None of this exists in a vacuum. The decision to defer to Greek authorities on ENTOS reflects a pattern of converting urgency into administration and a fundamental failure to address the urgent human rights issues of the day.
Greece is becoming a laboratory for a continent-wide shift toward preventive policing targeting racialised minorities. The Commission's silence removes another barrier to replication of that model. If the EU does not challenge the practice in Greece, other member states will perceive greater latitude to pursue similar measures. The language of "socially homogeneous groups" and "hotspots of illegality" is an increasingly common legislative sleight-of-hand dressing up ethnic targeting in neutral terminology and allowing the legal scrutiny to weaken. The Commission's response demonstrates exactly how well that strategy is working.
In 2010, Commissioner Reding said she was appalled by a situation which gave the impression that people were being removed from a Member State of the European Union just because they belonged to a certain ethnic minority. Operation ENTOS gives the impression that people are being subjected to militarised police raids in a Member State of the European Union just because they belong to a certain ethnic minority. The Commission gave a response in 2010 that matched the gravity of the situation while in 2026 all it can muster is the diplomatic equivalent of a polite shrug.
The tools remain. The precedents exist. The Commission's own studies identify the problem. What is missing (as ever) is the political will to say what Viviane Reding said sixteen years ago: that discrimination on the basis of ethnic origin has no place in Europe. Whether she would still be permitted to say it today is, perhaps, the more troubling question.
