The European Court Of Human Rights (ECtHR) decided on the 20th of July that Bulgaria’s pushback practice violates human rights. The Hand-over of a persecuted Turkish journalist back to Turkey was unlawful. The case was handed in by the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) A detailed summary of the reports on push-backs from Bulgaria, also mentioned in the press release by the ECCHR, can be found on our website.
In the case D v. Bulgaria, the ECtHR unanimously found that the applicant, a Turkish journalist, was forcibly returned to Turkey, after beeing caught at the Romanian-Bulgarian border with eight other refugees from Turkey and Syria. „The Bulgarian authorities had failed to carry out an assessment of the risk he faced there, and deprived him of the possibility to challenge his removal, breaching articles 3 and 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights“, the Court found.
Meanwhile the reports about Push-Backs from Bulgaria go on. In the AIDA 2020 report published by the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE), Push-backs affected more than 15,000 individuals in 2020 according to statistics collected by the national border monitoring network. In a report from March 2021, done by the Dutch VPRO-Program Frontline, 75-90 mostly Afghan people were involved in a Push-Back from Bulgaria to Greece. The group entered Greece on on May 29th near the village of Dikea at the Greek-Turkish-Bulgarian border.