Migrations, the new rejections of Croatia in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the European “brand”.

ROME – Since the end of March this year, the Croatian police has started a new and alarming practice of tracing, detention and collective expulsion of people moving towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, transporting them by bus to the border crossings, where they are then handed over to the Bosnian authorities . A disturbing practice denounced by Border violence monitoring network (BVMN), a coalition of more than 14 organisations, founded in 2016, with the aim of documenting illegal pushbacks and police violence by EU Member State authorities in the Western Balkans and Greece.

Readmissions are illegal. The net Turn to the Balkans relaunches the stance of the bvmnalso reiterating the concerns for the announced reactivation of readmissions at the Italian-Slovenian border by the Minister of the Interior Matteo Piantedosi at the end of 2022 and of which Turn to the Balkans has already requested the suspension given their proven illegitimacy. In the past, these readmissions have in fact translated into chain push-backs from Slovenia to Croatia and then, precisely, to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The repressive role of the Croatian police. According to the testimonies collected by the bvmn by the victims of the expulsions (subsequently confirmed on 30 March by the authorities of the Bosnian Canton of Una-Sana), the Croatian police intercept people on the move throughout the country and, after having stopped them, escort them to police stations using plainclothes vehicles . At the beginning of 2023, the Croatian Interior Minister adopted reorganization measures by reassigning 742 police officers, previously deployed at the border crossings with Slovenia and Hungary, to mobile teams in charge of tracking down migrants in the territories close to Croatia’s Schengen border .

“A van with no symbols stopped us near the road.” The people inside didn’t have police uniforms, but we saw they had weapons and from that we knew they were policemen. They put us in the van and took us to the police station. We didn’t know what would happen to us and we were all very scared, they kept yelling at us in their own language and refused to speak English,” described several people interviewed by the BVMN.

Persons detained for hours in the dungeons. Victims describe being held for hours in underground prison-like rooms without access to food and water, after which authorities issued a “readmission” decision to Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some people with whom the bvmn spoke complained that they were forced to sign documents in a language they did not understand, a ground of illegitimacy under Article 196 of the Law on Foreigners, to which the expulsion decisions refer. Furthermore, the victims claim that they did not have the opportunity to appeal against the procedure, provided for by the Regulation on free legal assistance in the process of expulsion and readmission of foreigners, as well as by international law.

Incarcerated, they slept on the floor. “They kept us in a kind of room in a basement without any explanation. We didn’t know what we were going to sign or what would happen to us. We asked for help for the children, at least diapers and milk for the little ones, but we didn’t even get that. A young man asked for his glasses to be returned, but they only said ‘no’. The women and children were very frightened, I didn’t know what to say to calm them down. After we stated several times that our children were hungry, we got bread and water. We slept on the floor for two days, and then they transferred us to another facility, where many people were kept in the same room with us,” said one of the detainee family members.

Civil society complaints. After signing the documents, the police officers transferred these groups, including minors, women and children, to other detention facilities. The descriptions of the duration of the journey and the appearance of the premises in which they were confined indicate the possibility that they were taken to the formally reception centers for foreigners in Ježevo and to the Tovarnik “transit” centre, essentially detention facilities. Both have also been the subject of complaints by civil society organizations for years over suspected human rights violations, including the inability to contact lawyers.

“The police asked us to pay for accommodation, food and transport”. “To the border, as if we were in a hotel and not in a prison. We didn’t ask to be taken there. We feel as if we had been robbed,” complains one of the men expelled in Bosnia and Herzegovina. After several days, and in some cases even weeks, spent in these centres, Croatian police began taking groups of people to the border crossing, where they were subsequently handed over to Bosnian authorities through the formal readmission process. Last week, the Slavonski Brod border crossing became a hotspot for collective readmissions.

Illegitimate practices. These practices are illegitimate, as evidenced by judicial precedents established by national courts in Italy, Slovenia and Austria, which have ruled the illegality of these types of bilateral readmissions, which constitute a violation of the international principle of non-refoulement. “The Italian experience allows us to state that the existence of bilateral readmission agreements with neighboring countries is a tool that offers the possibility of a distorted use of transfer procedures precisely because of the systematic incorrect application of the guarantees envisaged for the protection of the right to asylum and the right to an individual assessment of the entry conditions”, explained Anna Brambilla, a lawyer at Asgi (Association for Legal Studies on Immigration) who won the case against readmissions at the Tribunal of Rome in January 2021.

The witness. The same readmissions which, as mentioned, have been reactivated by the Italian government. The case was based on the testimony of a man sent back in chains from Italy, through Slovenia and Croatia, to Bosnia, documented by the bvmn. These are cases in which people have been sent back between EU Member States; the bilateral readmission of people moving to countries outside the EU is even more worrying and poses an even greater risk of breaching the principle of non-refoulement. Following readmissions from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina, agents of the Foreign Affairs Service (SFA) of Bosnia and HerzegovinaInternational Organization of Migration (Oim) then transferred the people to the Una-Sana canton, near the Croatian border: the men are taken to the transit-detention center in Lipa, and the families to the Bori?i reception center in Biha?.

Reiterated the request for suspension of responses. The net Turn to the Balkans In the light of these new procedures, it once again asks for the suspension of readmissions at the Italian-Slovenian border which risk turning into chain rejections towards Bosnia and Herzegovina. The network subscribes to the request for Border violence monitoring network addressed to the Croatian Ministry of the Interior to clarify the matter immediately and to ensure respect for the rights guaranteed by domestic and international law, including the right to international protection, access to appeal procedures, information on legal rights, translation throughout the proceedings and free legal assistance to all persons moving within the territory of the Republic of Croatia.