AYS Digest 03/09/21 — MEPs challenge Slovenia over chain-pushbacks of people on the move
By: Are You Syrious
Tags: Migration, Digest, Refugees, Human Rights, Immigration

AYS Digest 03/09/21 — MEPs challenge Slovenia over chain-pushbacks of people on the move

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FEATURE — “Tell us what you will do to stop the illegality, impunity and the brutality”: MEPs confront Slovenia over chain-pushbacks

MEPs from the Left in the European Parliament pose with BVMN’s Black Book of Pushbacks this month. (Source: Twitter)

This week, MEPs in the Left in the European Parliament challenged Slovenian Interior Minister Aleš Hojs over Slovenia’s participation in chain-pushbacks of people on the move during a meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs. The intervention in the EP was prepared BVMN and network members InfoKolpa and Are You Syrious, and saw MEPs criticizing the Slovenian Ministry of the Interior for continuing to ignore a Supreme Court ruling which established that Slovenia had violated the rights of a Cameroonian man through a chain-pushback. Malin Björk, an MEP from Sweden, had recently returned from a visit to Velika Kladuša, in northwest Bosnia, with representatives from AYS. Björk spoke about what she saw there:

I was in Velika Kladuša in Bosnia, I was astonished to meet many migrants and refugees that had been to Slovenia, but they had been told that the right to seek asylum did not exist in your country. One of the persons that I met there was from Cameroon and had escaped political persecution. Once he thought he was in safety in Slovenia he called the police himself to ask to be able to claim asylum. Instead he was as so many others, as thousands of others, handed over to the Croatian police who brutalised him and sent him back to Bosnia. This case is a little bit special, compared to the many thousands of others, because on 9th April this year the Slovenian Supreme Court itself ruled that Slovenian police had violated the principle of non-refoulement, the prohibition of collective expulsion and denied him the right to seek international protection. You (Minister Hojs) have had meetings with Commissioner Johansson and you have said you will stand up for the right to seek asylum for asylum seekers. Now your own court has found that you fail in this case. So my questions are: Will you stand by your words and provide a humanitarian visa for this person so that he can come back to Slovenia to apply for asylum as he was supposed to have been granted two years ago? And the second is more structural of course, how will you ensure that people have the right to apply for asylum in Slovenia, that they are not brutally pushed back to Croatian police, who are then illegally pushing them back to Bosnia in a kind of chain pushback situation which is a shame, a shame, at European borders?”

The case to which Björk refers was the result of strategic litigation efforts led by BVMN network member InfoKolpa, which resulted in a landmark judgement issued on 16 July 2020 by the Slovenian Administrative Court. The case established that in August 2019, the Slovenian authorities carried out an illegal collective expulsion of a persecuted English-speaking minority member from Cameroon who wished to apply for asylum in the country. The Slovenian Supreme Court found on April 9, 2021 that its own police force had violated the principle of non-refoulement, the prohibition of collective expulsions and denied the individual the right to seek international protection. The court ordered that the Cameroonian man be allowed to re-enter Slovenia and ask for asylum, but the authorities have thus far made no efforts to respect the court’s ruling.

During the Committee meeting, Malin Björk handed a copy of the Black Book of Pushbacks to Minister Hojs. The Black Book is a dossier of cases recorded by BVMN of pushback testimonies from across the Balkans stretching back to 2017. The book contains a large section on Slovenian chain pushbacks — 1266 people who had been chain pushed back from Slovenia, via Croatia, to either Bosnia or Serbia.

“I expect you as a responsible Minister, not only for your country, but for the EU Presidency to take part of this document and tell us what you will do to stop the illegality, impunity and the brutality,” Björk told Hojs.