In March 2023, Bulgarian and European Commission (EC) officials decided on a pilot project about “returning home“ from Bulgaria. It also includes rejection and return decisions to be issued simultaneously. Now it seems that refugees additionally are being coerced into an EU-funded ‘voluntary return’ program. Between January and June 2025, Bulgaria conducted 50 ‘assisted forced returns’ of Syrian nationals, according to statistics of Eurostat.
But obviously not every return is voluntary. After crossing the border and later found by Bulgarian authorities, migrants usually get arrested, until it is clear what will happen to them. Already in 2024, the NGO No Name Kitchen (NNK) reported, that Bulgarian authorities are forced Syrian refugees to sign voluntary return papers in the reception center of Harmanli. Later the Newspaper Guardian wrote a follow up about the case with its own investigation. The lawyer Diana Radoslavova from the organization Centre for legal aid in Bulgaria framed such kind of counseling procedure in an article for Balkan Insight as follows:
“When people hear ‘You will stay here for 18 months’, they prefer to sign for voluntary return,“ (…) “Maybe not on the first try, not on the second, but the consecutive sessions that they have every month when the conditions are really worsening… People just don’t endure. They sign.“
Since the fall of Assad in Syria, Bulgaria is denying asylum to Syrian refugees in Bulgaria. FRONTEX in Bulgaria is offering return counseling for rejected asylum seekers. Balkan Insight reports, that in 2024 an amount of 976 “information sessions“ were conducted. In the first eight months of 2025 already 1152 sessions were conducted.