KLIKAKTIV’S STATEMENT ON SERBIAN POLICE VIOLENCE TOWARDS REFUGEES IN SOMBOR CAMP AND MALI ZVORNIK BORDER CROSSING
Klikaktiv strongly condemns violence perpetuated by the Serbian police officers towards refugees in the Sombor camp and Mali Zvornik border crossing between Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and we call upon state authorities to undertake due procedures to establish identification, accountability and prosecution of the said police officers.
On April 24th, two videos showing police officers beating up refugees in Serbia in two separate incidents were published on social media and online news portals in the country. The first video depicts two police officers beating two kneeling refugees showing no resistance at a parking lot in the vicinity of border crossing Mali Zvornik. The second video was shot within a reception center in Sombor, run by Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Migration, and it shows two police officers severly beating two male refugees lying on the floor, during a police raid of the camp. According to the information obtained by Klikaktiv, one of the two refugees is an unaccompanied boy. This is the first time that videos of police violence have been publicly shared, even though the Klikaktiv team has been told by refugees in the field about the violence of the Serbian police for several weeks now since the beginning of 2023, even though such accounts were not common in the previous years.
According to the Geneva convention on refugees’ status and several Serbian legal regulations, Serbia has an obligation to provide refugees with an effective access to asylum procedure and international protection. The Serbian Commissariat for Refugees and Migration is in charge of managing 18 refugee camps, funded mostly through EU funds and supported by international agencies such as UNHCR and IOM, with the aim to provide refugees with a safe accommodation in Serbia. It is unacceptable that refugees experience brutal physical violence especially within these official camps, in which they should be granted support to access the asylum procedure and legalize their stay in the country.
For several years now, we have witnessed physical and psychological violence that refugees endure at the EU external borders, committed during push backs of the refugees from the EU member states countries, with the goal of “safekeeping Fortress Europe”. In the previos few months, the externalization was pushed further with the countries of the so-called West Balkans taking over the role of EU border safekeeping hoping this will help their process of becoming EU member states themselves at some point in the future.
Violence towards refugees in Serbia must not become normalized way of the state’s and police treatment of the people on the move, nor can be justified in any way. We expect that the police violence as depicted in the videos will further push refugees into squats (informal settlements in the border area) and further dependent of the organized criminal groups of smugglers, as the state authorities mandated to provide the refugees with protection are treating them violently, inhumanely, and humiliatingly.
The videos can be seen at this post on Klikaktiv’s Facebook page.