Clothes burned, cell phones and passports confiscated, beatings and sexual assaults. The victims of this violence are asylum seekers who try to enter the European Union, but are rejected by the Croatian police. This is the picture that emerges from an investigation published by the British newspaper The Guardian. The victims are migrants mainly from South Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and China. They all try to cross the Balkans to join the European bloc, but are systematically rejected in Bosnia by Croatian agents. Thousands of people remain stuck at the border for months at a time with freezing temperatures and inhumane conditions. Added to these conditions, according to the report by the humanitarian organization No Name Kitchen (NNK), are the brutality of the agents placed at the borders.
Documents and objects burned
The NKK investigation details how the Croatian police incinerate the personal belongings and documents of people stopped at the border. Essential elements they needed to apply for asylum once they arrived in the European Union. Smartphones also ended up in the piles of ash, burned because they could also contain evidence of abuse perpetrated by the Croatian police in the form of videos and photos taken by asylum seekers. The report is the result of numerous visits to the Bosnia-Croatia border between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. The organization identified sites in areas known for pushbacks. Identity cards, half-burnt bags, hundreds of phones, but also clothing and official government documents, as well as money and other everyday objects were recovered. All evidence that confirms the complaints received by the organization, which has collected testimonies of violence by the border police.
Torture at the border
Among the most serious cases are those relating to sexual violence. Like the one reported by a 23-year-old pregnant Moroccan woman, who in December 2023 said she had been sexually assaulted by Croatian officers before the guards burned her personal belongings. The woman, who was traveling with her husband, another woman and three minors, said a border guard subjected her to an invasive body search, which also included her genitals, and threatened to rape her. The search “was the worst thing that could have happened to me,” the woman said. “I would rather he hit me than search me like that.”
The farce of the elections in Tunisia: this is how Meloni secures the migrant policeman
Another dramatic testimony is that of a group of four Moroccan men. The incident dates back to November 2023 when the migrants were beaten by police officers who then burned their belongings. They said the police forced them to walk barefoot on the hot ashes, threatening them with batons. The Moroccan man who provided the testimony suffered burns on the soles of his feet, as verified by NKK. The organization also recently submitted a report to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on border torture.
The rejections of migrants denied by Croatia
Faced with these accusations, collected by humanitarian workers and journalists, the Croatian government has always denied the pushbacks in Bosnia as well as the violence against asylum seekers. These would be serious violations of international and European law, given that asylum seekers have the right to enter the countries of the bloc in order to submit an application. A spokesperson for the Croatian Ministry of the Interior spoke of a “zero tolerance policy for any potential illegal activity committed by its staff”. All responsibilities were therefore shifted elsewhere. The spokesperson said that human traffickers are often responsible for violence and thefts at the border, while the police have documented “many cases of trumped-up charges”.
“Regarding claims that Croatian police are burning items confiscated from migrants, we would like to let you know that, to avoid being returned to Croatia as applicants for international protection, migrants sometimes destroy items they bring with them and throw away their belongings when they try to cross the border illegally,” the spokesperson said. In 2019, after months of official denials, in an interview on Swiss television, then-Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović admitted that the police had used force, but denied that the pushbacks were illegal. That same year the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the Croatian police were responsible for the death of a six-year-old Afghan girl, who together with her family had been forced to return to Serbia by crossing train tracks. She had been hit and killed by a train.
