BELGRADE, Serbia (AP) – Hamid Ahmadi can still feel the cold of February evening when Serbian police left him and two dozen other refugees in a forest.
Pressed into a police van, the refugees from Afghanistan thought they were on their way to an asylum seeker camp in eastern Serbia. Instead, they were ordered four years ago in the middle of the night near the border with Bulgaria. In temperatures below freezing and in dire need of help, they had no choice but to leave for Bulgaria – the country they had left just a day before.
“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, one can not forget the difficult times.”
The Serbian border police have carried out a retreat or a collective eviction, one of many such actions along the itineraries used by migrants and refugees to reach Western Europe. But unlike most such illegal deportations, the officials’ actions in February 2017 resulted in the Afghan refugees achieving an unprecedented legal victory in Serbia’s Supreme Court.
The constitutional court in the Balkans ruled in December that the border guards had illegally deported the refugees and violated their rights. The court also ordered Serbian authorities to compensate the 17 members of the group that brought the lawsuit, each with 1,000 euros ($ 1,180).
“The importance of this ruling is very important for Serbia,” said Belgrade lawyer Nikola Kovacevic. He represented the refugees in the case. It sends a “clear message to state authorities to harmonize their border practices with local and international law.”
The ruling is a rare official recognition that countries in Europe are making retreats in violation of the European Union and international laws that forcibly ban people from entering other countries without looking at their individual circumstances or allowing them to apply for asylum.
Although refugees and economic migrants traveling through the Balkans regularly report on the practice, the authorities regularly deny that their agencies are pushing back, which is difficult to prove and mostly goes unpunished.
Turning back and forth at different borders, people fleeing war and poverty spend months, if not years, on the road, exposed to difficult circumstances and danger in the hands of human traffickers and traffickers.. Sometimes refugees and migrants are sent back across two or three borders, which took them months to cross.
Human rights groups have repeatedly called on governments to fulfill their responsibilities regarding refugee rights and have accused the European Union of shutting down the illegal activities that are taking place at the door.
The United Nations mission in Bosnia this month called for urgent action to stop a setback along EU member Croatia’s border with Bosnia after a UN team encountered 50 men with wounds on their bodies who reported that authorities had pushed them back and taken away their belongings when they wanted to enter Croatia.
According to the UN refugee agency’s office in Serbia and its partners, 25,180 people were repatriated from Serbia, Bosnia, Hungary and Romania last year.
Kovacevic, the lawyer in Serbia, said collective evictions are becoming more common to 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 flocked to the mainland last year. In the agreement, Turkey was asked 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 the boundaries have introduced the use of systematic violations of the ban on collective evictions,” Kovacevic said. “But at least now it has been officially confirmed in Serbia, not by a non-governmental organization, locally or abroad, but the highest authority for the protection of human rights.”
Border guards regularly rob refugees of cellphones or documents to hide any evidence of wrongdoing. In the case of Ahmadi and the others, a clear trail of evidence was left behind thanks to what Kovacevic said was the “blatant arrogance” of the Serbian police who “thought they could do what they wanted.”
It started on February 2, 2017 when 25 migrants, including nine children, were caught at the border with Bulgaria and taken to a nearby police station in Serbia. They were detained for hours in a basement room and then taken before a judge to face charges of illegal crossing the border. However, the judge ruled that the group should be treated as refugees and taken to an asylum center.
Ahmadi, who spoke to the AP through an interpreter from Germany, said he clearly remembered when the judge asked them if they wanted to stay in Serbia. He said he was glad they would finally have a place in the camp after traveling through Turkey and Bulgaria.
An hour later, inside the bus of the border police that they had to take to the camp, Ahmadi realized that something was wrong. When police let them down in the woods, he felt ‘broken’. “I thought of my family at home.”
In the pitch-dark and icy temperature, the refugees marched on foot to Bulgaria – and directly into the hands of the country’s border police. They succeed in calling an interpreter in Serbia who has warned refugee rights activists in Serbia as well as in Bulgaria.
The refugees stayed in camps in Bulgaria, some days and others longer, before returning to Serbia and later moving to Western Europe. The legal lawyers later collected documentation left behind by the Serbian court and the Bulgarian authorities, which confirmed a clear trace of events that helped build the case in court.
Four years later, Kovacevic tried to establish contact with all the people from Afghanistan he represented; they are distributed in countries that also include France and Bosnia. Coronavirus locks have made it harder to make contact and arrange money transfers for the damage they have won, he said.
“It’s taking a little longer, but we’ll get there,” Kovacevic smiled.
Ahmadi, who was granted asylum in Germany five months ago, said he planned to use the damages to help him and his wife start a new life in Europe. He is now taking German language lessons before going to look for work.
“This compensation means a lot to me,” he said. “I will be able to buy a bed and something for our apartment as soon as we rent it.”
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