BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) – Hamid Ahmadi can still feel the cold of February night when Serbian police left him and two dozen other refugees in a forest.
Trapped in a police van, Afghan refugees thought they were heading to an asylum seeker camp in eastern Serbia. Instead, they were ordered to leave near the country’s border with Bulgaria in the middle of that night four years ago. At temperatures below freezing and desperately in need of help, they had no choice but to head to Bulgaria, the country they had left just a day earlier.
“I will not forget it as long as I live,” said Ahmadi, who was then 17 and now lives in Germany. “Even after a period of good life and stability, hard times cannot be forgotten.”
Serbian border police had been involved in a mass retreat or expulsion, one of many such actions along the travel routes used by migrants and refugees trying to reach Western Europe. But unlike most of these illegal deportations, the actions of the officers in February 2017 resulted in Afghan refugees gaining an unprecedented legal victory in Serbia’s highest court.
The Balkan Constitutional Court ruled in December that border control officers illegally deported refugees and violated their rights. The court also ordered Serbian authorities to pay compensation to the 17 members of the group who filed the lawsuit for 1,000 euros ($ 1,180) each.
“The importance of this verdict is immense for Serbia,” said Belgrade lawyer Nikola Kovacevic, who represented the refugees in the case. It sends a “clear message to state authorities to harmonize their border practices with national and international law.”
The ruling is a rare official recognition that European countries are making setbacks that violate international and European Union laws that prohibit the forced return of people to other countries without examining their individual circumstances or allowing them to seek asylum.
Although refugees and economic migrants passing through the Balkans regularly explain the practice, the authorities routinely deny that their agencies are making setbacks, which are difficult to prove and, for the most part, go unpunished.
Back and forth across various borders, people fleeing war and poverty spend months, if not years, on the road, exposed to harsh conditions and danger at the hands of traffickers and human traffickers.. Sometimes refugees and migrants are returned across two or three borders that took them months to cross.
Human rights groups have repeatedly called on governments to fulfill their responsibilities related to refugee rights and have accused the European Union of turning a blind eye to illegal activities taking place at its doors.
The UN mission in Bosnia this month called for urgent action to stop setbacks on Croatia’s border with Bosnia, an EU member, after a UN team found 50 wounded men about their bodies, who reported that the authorities pushed them and took their possessions when they tried to enter Croatia.
According to the office of the United Nations refugee agency in Serbia and its partners, 25,180 people were pushed into Serbia from Croatia, Bosnia, Hungary and Romania last year.
Kovacevic, Serbia’s lawyer, said mass evictions were becoming more frequent after the EU and Turkey made a 2016 agreement aimed at curbing migration to Europe. More than a million people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia had headed to the continent the year before. The agreement called for 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 ban on collective expulsions,” Kovacevic said. “But at least now in Serbia, this was officially confirmed, not by a non-governmental, local or foreign organization, but by the highest authority for the protection of human rights.”
To hide any evidence of illicit acts, border control officers routinely remove refugees from cell phones or documents. In the case of Ahmadi and the others, a clear trail of evidence was left thanks to what Kovacevic said was the “blatant arrogance” of the Serbian police who “thought he could do whatever he wanted.”
It began on February 2, 2017, when 25 migrants, including nine children, were trapped on the border with Bulgaria and taken to a police station near Serbia. They were held for hours in a basement room, and then taken before a judge to face charges of crossing the border illegally. The judge, however, ruled that the group should be treated as refugees and taken to an asylum center.
Ahmadi, who spoke to the AP from Germany through an interpreter, said he clearly remembers when the judge asked them if they wanted to stay in Serbia. He said he was glad they finally had a place in the camp after traveling through Turkey and Bulgaria.
Hours later, inside the border police van that was supposed to take them to camp, Ahmadi realized something was wrong. When police abandoned them in the woods, “I felt broken,” he recalled. “I thought about my family at home.”
With the icy and dark temperatures, the refugees headed on foot to Bulgaria and passed directly into the hands of the country’s border police. They managed to call an interpreter in Serbia, who alerted refugee rights activists in both Serbia and Bulgaria.
The refugees remained in camps in Bulgaria, some for days and some more, before returning to Serbia and then moving on to Western Europe. Later, the rights lawyers collected documentation left by the Serbian court and the Bulgarian authorities, establishing a clear trace of the facts that helped build the case in court.
Four years later, Kovacevic tries to make contact with all the people of Afghanistan he represented; they are scattered in countries that also include France and Bosnia. Coronavirus blockages have made it harder to make contacts and arrange money transfers for the damage they earned, he said.
“Let’s take a little longer, but we’ll get there,” Kovacevic smiled.
Ahmadi, who received asylum in Germany five months ago, said he plans to use the damage to help him and his wife start a new life in Europe. He is now taking German classes before looking for work.
“That compensation means a lot to me,” he said. “I’ll be able to buy a bed and something for our flat once we rent it.”
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