The space debris population in the low Earth orbit (LEO) region, which is defined as the region up to 2000 kilometers altitude, has been extensively studied during the last decade and reasonable models covering all size ranges were produced. Information on the distribution of objects in the geostationary ring (GEO) and the geostationary transfer orbits (GTOs), however, is still comparatively sparse. Recognizing the paramount importance of protecting the geostationary ring from contaminating space debris, ESA initiated an optical search for fragments in the geostationary ring in order to improve the knowledge about the debris population in GEO and to understand the future evolution of this population. The Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern (AIUB) performs the observations on behalf of ESA at ESA’s 1-meter Telescope in Tenerife. Regular survey campaigns covering the GEO region have taken place since autumn 1999. New search scenarios to detect objects in highly elliptical orbits, particularly optimized for the GTO region, have been applied since June 2002 during about 50% of the observation time. For a subset of the detections we perform real-time follow-up observations shortly after the discovery. This allows estimating full six-parameter orbits for this subset, whereas for the remaining objects we are only able to determine circular orbits. The measurements reveal a significant population of small-sized debris in GEO and GTO orbits, but also in some unexpected elliptical orbit regimes. In particular a population of faint, uncatalogued objects with mean motions around 1 rev/day and eccentricities as high as e < 0.6 has been identified. This population was definitely unexpected by the space debris community. A first analysis of the orbits of a subset of the objects yielded very high area-to-mass ratios for these objects. This in turn supports the hypothesis that the new population is actually debris generated in GEO, which is driven into highly eccentric orbits by solar radiation pressure.