Hyperbolicity, automorphic forms and Siegel modular varieties

We study the hyperbolicity of compactifications of quotients of bounded symmetric domains by arithmetic groups. We prove that, up to an \'etale cover, they are Kobayashi hyperbolic modulo the boundary. Applying our techniques to Siegel modular varieties, we improve some former results of Nadel on the non-existence of certain level structures on abelian varieties over complex function fields.