Chained push-back from Serbia to Greece
During one of our regular visits to Majdan (village at the border with Romania) in October 2020, we met Abdula* from Morocco who told us that he was forcibly taken from the Asylum camp in Tutin by the Serbian police and pushed back to the Macedonian territory with the threat of a firearm. This happened in April 2020, in the middle of the state of emergency imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Besides him, roughly another 15 guys from Morocco and Algeria were also forcibly pushed back to Macedonia.
This push-back was already previously reported by Border Violence Monitoring Network in their report “Special Report: Covid-19 and border violence along the Balkan route” from April so we knew what happened. This report is available at:
https://www.borderviolence.eu/.../upl.../COVID-19-Report.pdf
Abdula* shared with us the video he made in the police van while the police were driving them from the Asylum camp in Tutin to the border with Macedonia. They were initially told that the police will transfer them to a different camp, but when they stepped out of the van and when the police started yelling at them “Macedonia, go, go!” they have realized that they are at the Macedonian border. The whole group was pushed back to Macedonia where they stayed for a couple of days in abounded building close to the border with Serbia until they were apprehended by the Macedonian police and pushed back to Greece. Abdula* spent the next couple of months on the streets of Thessaloniki, while the Covid-19 outbreak was at its peak, without basic living conditions. He managed to come back to Serbia in September with the help of a smuggler. He says that he would never go back to the camp in Serbia because he fears that he might be pushed back again. Instead, he prefers to say in an abandoned house in Majdan until he reaches Romania.
“There are no laws in Serbia. No justice. I will search for justice and protection in some other European country”, Abdula* told us when we offered him legal protection in this case.
KlikAktiv points out that this case of collective expulsion of refugees from the Serbian territory is not isolated. Similar cases have happened before and apparently are part of the “migration management” not only in Serbia but in other countries as well. Along the whole Balkan Route refugees are constantly exposed to violence, forced and illegal push-backs and in most cases, they don’t have access to effective asylum procedures. But the practice of illegal push-backs only contributes to stronger smuggling networks, since it can not be expected that humans will get used to and settle for a life without any rights and protection on the streets of Greece or Macedonia. This is why we request from all countries on the Balkan Route to immediately stop the practice of forced and illegal push-backs to the territory of other countries, but instead to respect their international obligations and national regulations and establish an effective and fair asylum system.