Turned back by Italy, migrants face perilous winter in Balkans
By Emma Bubola and Gaia Pianigiani New York Times,Updated February 8, 2021, 2:22 a.m.
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In this Friday Jan. 15, 2021 file photo, migrants ate in a makeshift camp in a forest outside Velika Kladusa, Bosnia.Kemal Softic/Associated Press
ROME â To escape persecution in his homeland, a 27-year-old Pakistani man walked over mountains and through woods on an arduous 18-month journey across Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia until he finally reached the Italian border.
A few hours later, Italian guards in the city of Trieste took him to a hill, counted to five, and told him to run back across the border into Slovenia, he recalled. The following day, he said, the Slovenian authorities handed him over to Croatian police at the border, who beat him with batons wrapped with barbed wire as he lay handcuffed before deporting him to neighboring Bosnia.
InfoMigrants By Emma Wallis Published on : 2021/02/01
The Hungarian Helsinki Committee, along with various other human rights advocacy groups, have been busy collecting evidence documenting Hungary’s continual flouting of EU law with regards to pushbacks. Since the EU Court of Justice declared Hungary’s pushbacks illegal in December 2020, a recorded 4,903 people have been pushed back to Serbia.
Léderer is senior advocacy officer with the Hungarian Helsinki Committee (HHC), a human rights NGO based in Budapest. He feels Frontex’ decision is partly due to his painstaking work gathering evidence to show that Hungary has continued with pushbacks, despite the European Court of Justice (ECJ) declaring those pushbacks illegal on December 17, 2020.
Last modified on Tue 2 Feb 2021 04.19 EST
An Afghan girl pulls her baby sister along in a pram through the mud and snow. Saman is six and baby Darya is 10 months old. They and their family have been pushed back into Bosnia 11 times by the Croatian police, who stripped Darya bare to check if the parents had hidden mobile phones or money in her nappy.
âThey searched her as though she were an adult. I could not believe my eyes,â says Daryaâs mother, Maryam, 40, limping through the mud and clinging to a stick.
The Guardian followed the journey of Darya and that of dozens of other migrant children who, every day, walk, or are carried on their parentsâ backs through the snowy paths that cross the woods around Bosanska Bojna, the last Bosnian village before the Croatian border, in an attempt to reach an increasingly inhospitable central Europe. Few families are successful. Most of them are stopped by Croatian police, searched, allegedly often robbed and, sometimes vio
The role of technology in illegal pushbacks from Croatia to Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia
28 January 2021
Border Violence Monitoring Network has published its submission to a recent UN Special Rapporteur inquiry on race, borders and digital technologies. The submission highlights how drones, thermal imaging cameras, and vehicle scanners have been weaponised against people-on-the-move, making them easier to detect and thus compounding their vulnerability and the dangers they face. This report provides an overview of different cases which BVMN have collected over the last years in which the use of EU-funded security technology was deployed by Croatian authorities either immediately preceding or during an illegal pushbacks. Links to the full incident reports are included for each case study. The case studies are categorized into several different sections: drones, helicopters, scanners for vehicle detection, and thermal/night vision. Each section is complemented by an overview of
Forty-three refugees drown off Libya’s coast: victims of the European Union’s refugee policy
At least 43 refugees drowned on January 19 off the Libyan coast during their attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Only 10 people could be rescued. They were returned to Libya by the Libyan coastguard. The mass death in the Mediterranean, for which the European Union (EU) bears responsibility, thus continues into yet another year.
The dinghy, carrying more than 50 people, suffered engine failure amid rough seas and capsized shortly after leaving the port city of Zawiyah, west of Tripoli, in the early hours of the morning. The survivors, who came from the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Ghana and Gambia, stated that everyone on board the capsized boat came from West Africa.