BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) – Hamid Ahmadi can still feel the chill of the February night when Serbian police left him and two dozen other refugees in a forest.
The refugees from Afghanistan, crammed into a police van, thought they were on their way to an asylum seekers camp in eastern Serbia. Instead, they were ordered in the middle of that night four years ago from the country’s border with Bulgaria. In freezing temperatures and in dire need of help, they had no choice but to go to Bulgaria – the country they left the day before.
“I will not forget it as long as I live,” said Ahmadi, who was 17 at the time and now lives in Germany. “Even after a period of good life and stability, the difficult times cannot be forgotten.”
Serbian Border Police had been guilty of a backlash, or collective expulsion, one of many such actions along the travel routes used by migrants and refugees trying to reach Western Europe. But unlike most such illegal deportations, the officers’ actions in February 2017 resulted in the Afghan refugees achieving an unprecedented legal victory in Serbia’s highest court.
The Balkan Constitutional Court ruled in December that border guards were unlawfully deporting the refugees and violating their rights. The court also ordered the Serbian authorities to pay the 17 members of the group who filed the lawsuit each in damages.
“The importance of this verdict is enormous for Serbia,” said Belgrade lawyer Nikola Kovacevic, who represented the refugees in the case. It sends a “clear message to government agencies to align their border practices with national and international law.”
The ruling is a rare official recognition that countries in Europe are carrying out pushbacks in violation of the European Union and international laws that prohibit returning people to other countries forcibly without looking at their individual circumstances or allowing them asylum. to request.
While refugees and economic migrants traveling through the Balkans regularly report on the practice, authorities routinely deny that their agencies carry out pushbacks, which are difficult to prove and usually go unpunished.
Torn at different borders, people fleeing war and poverty spend months, if not years, on the road, exposed to harsh conditions and danger at the hands of people smugglers and traffickersSometimes refugees and migrants are sent back across two or three borders that took them months.
Human rights groups have repeatedly called on governments to respect their refugee rights responsibilities and accused the European Union of turning a blind eye to the illegal activities taking place on the doorstep.
The United Nations mission in Bosnia this month called for urgent action to stop the backlash along the border of EU member Croatia with Bosnia after a UN team found 50 men injured on their bodies who reported authorities pushing them back and taking their belongings when they tried to enter Croatia.
According to the office of the UN Refugee Agency in Serbia and its partners, 25,180 people were forced back to Serbia from Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary and Romania last year.
Kovacevic, the lawyer in Serbia, said collective evictions were increasingly common after the EU and Turkey made a 2016 agreement to curb migration to Europe. More than a million people from the Middle East, Africa, and Asia had flocked to the continent the year before. The agreement called on Turkey to control the flow of people leaving its territory in exchange for aid for the large number of Syrian refugees in Turkey, as well as other incentives.
“All borders have introduced the practice of systematic violations of the collective expulsion ban,” said Kovacevic. “But now in Serbia at least this has been officially confirmed, not by any non-governmental organization, local or foreign, but by the highest authority for the protection of human rights.”
To conceal any evidence of wrongdoing, border control officers routinely strip refugees of cell phones or documents. In the case of Ahmadi and the others, a clear trail of evidence was left thanks to what Kovacevic said: the Serbian police’s “blatant arrogance” who “thought they could do whatever they wanted.”
It started on February 2, 2017, when 25 migrants, including nine children, were rounded up at the border with Bulgaria and taken to a nearby police station in Serbia. They were held in a basement room for hours and then brought to a judge to be charged with illegally crossing the border. However, the judge ruled that the group should be treated as refugees and taken to an asylum seekers’ center.
Ahmadi, speaking to the AP through an interpreter from Germany, said he clearly remembers the judge asking them to stay in Serbia. He said he was happy that they would finally have a place in the camp after traveling through Turkey and Bulgaria.
Hours later, in the border police van to take them to the camp, Ahmadi realized that something was wrong. When the police left them in the woods, “I felt broken,” he recalls. “I thought about my family at home.”
In pitch darkness and freezing temperatures, the refugees headed for Bulgaria on foot – and directly into the hands of the border police in that country. They managed to call an interpreter in Serbia, who warned activists about refugee rights in both Serbia and Bulgaria.
The refugees stayed in camps in Bulgaria, some for days and others longer, before returning to Serbia and later on to Western Europe. The rights attorneys later collected documentation left behind by the Serbian court and the Bulgarian authorities and recorded a clear trace of the events that contributed to the build-up of the case in court.
Four years later, Kovacevic tries to make contact with all the people from Afghanistan he represented; they are spread over countries including France and Bosnia. Coronavirus lockouts have made it more difficult to contact and arrange money transfers for the damage they’ve taken, he said.
“It will take a little longer, but we’ll get there,” smiled Kovacevic.
Ahmadi, who was granted asylum in Germany five months ago, said he plans to use the compensation to help him and his wife start a new life in Europe. He is now taking German language lessons before looking for a job.
“This compensation means a lot to me,” he said. “I will be able to buy a bed and a little something for our flat as soon as we rent it.”
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