Bulgaria’s government approved changes for a restricted movement regime

Publiziert am 2. September 2016 von mf

Last week, changes were approved by the Bulgarian government to the statute of the national refugee agency of Bulgaria. Basically, the changes will restrict the movement of asylum seekers in the open centers of the State Agency for Refugees (SAR) who had broke the „rules“. They will have to stay in detention spaces that are installed within the ‚open camps‘. Another change, which was approved, was the implementation of limited public areas for asylum seekers in Bulgaria. In fact this is a residential obligation which e.g. could span special areas from the open camps to the city or in the space of the municipality. People who are being caught outside the allowed areas, will be sent to the closed space within the ‚open centers‘.

New closed area with separated gate within Harmanli camp (Photo: Giovanni Piazzese)

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Push-Backs: Bulgarian-Turkish cooperation leads to more violation of human rights

Publiziert am 15. August 2016 von mf

On the 11th of August 2016, Bulgaria was criticized by the UN rights chief, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, who sees ‘worrying signs’ in Bulgaria’s detention regime for migrants. He said he is concerned about the court cases in the Svilengrad Regional Court. Many migrants have to face such cases, because of criminal prosecution for “irregular border crossing“.

There are migrants who do not have access to adequate legal representation or translation services, to the extent that they are sometimes even unaware that they have been prosecuted – this is clearly contrary to fair trial and due process safeguards.

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Breaking News: Man dies after push-back from Bulgaria

Publiziert am 30. Juli 2016 von mf

Several Turkish speaking news sites (citing an article of a journalist from the Anadolou Agency) were reporting about a new victim of the European Border Regime. The 28 year old Iranian Reza Hassani was missing for about 18 days. He was found dead in the jungles of Karacadağ. It was reported to Bordermonitoring Bulgaria (BMB) from another source that he was beaten up together with a friend and pushed back „by Bulgarians into Turkey“.  After the push-back he was rarely able to move and got stuck in the middle of nowhere without a phone or food. The police showed a photo of Reza Hassani’s dead corpse to his friend and told him that they will transport the body to the forensics-center in Istanbul.

It is still not clear if the push-back was done by Bulgarian border police or by members of one of the violent and nationalist voluntary groups. In the last weeks, it was reported by several international media that Tatjana Festerling, a former leading person of the German PEGIDA movement, and her colleague Edwin Wagensveld from the Netherlands showed solidarity with these groups. Some of these “voluntary“ groups hold connections to criminal organizations or are part of them. They are practicing physical violence and intimidation that produce strong permanent injuries and result sometimes even in push-backs to Turkey.

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Bulgaria responds with push-backs to the increasing amount of asylum-seekers

Publiziert am 6. Juni 2016 von mf

In the last days there were reports appearing concerning several groups of people who managed to pass from Greece to Bulgaria. It was furthermore reported by the news agency Novinite that 53 migrants were quickly sent back by the Bulgarian authorities to Greece. They were caught in Kulata. Another group of 34, were caught in a freight train on the route from Greece to Bulgaria. A next report of Novinite claims, that at one day only in 24 hours another 215 migrants were prevented to enter Bulgaria – 62 tried to cross at Novo Selo (from Greece to Bulgaria), 155 tried to cross from Turkey to Bulgaria.

The Bulgarian Ministry of Interior (MoI) announced later on in their public statistics, that altogether 360 people were caught in the last week at the Bulgarian borders – 169 at the border to Turkey, 152 at the border to Serbia and 39 in the country itself. 287 migrants left the refugee camps in a week, 281 of them were with no status. After further statistics, 250 migrants where caught in total, while they tried to cross from Greece to Bulgaria, since the beginning of the year.

Already on the 13th, 14th and 15th of May 2016, Bordermonitoring Bulgaria (BMB) interviewed several refugees in Belgrade about their experiences in Bulgaria. In the following, we document some of this testimonies :

When we passed the border from Turkey to Bulgaria, we were arrested from the Bulgarian border police. We were a group of 20 people, also a family was part [of the group]. When the police arrested us, they firs checked our documents and then they took everything, like for example money. I had 200 Euro […] The Bulgarian police took 200 Euro from me and a Galaxy S4 mobile. And everything what I had in my backpack, like trousers, T-Shirts, a jacket, they emptied out. […] We were carrying only our underwear and were kicked. […]  Afterwards they set the dogs on us, but they did not bite us. We sat in front of the dogs and the dogs did not move (Jamal, 32 years, Afghanistan 1)

Later, the whole group was pushed-back by Bulgarian border police. BMB was told about another group of 18 people, that was beaten up by the Bulgarian border police and got as well pushed-back when they crossed the Turkish-Bulgarian border.

They [the border police] asked us from where we are coming and suddenly they hit us. Afterwards they hit us, they searched our pockets. I had 1200 Euro in my pocket stored to continue my journey later. Later they took my money and my two mobile phones. When I said, please give me at least one mobile phone back, four police men took me on the side and started to hit me (Nargis, 36 years, Pakistan).

The third group got in contact with the Bulgarian border police when they already had arrived in Sofia. The police arrested the people and brought them to a police station. There they had to stay for three days. Later they were brought to Busmantsi:

We were 22 people and wanted to pass the border from Bulgaria to Turkey. Six days we walked in the rain, we crossed mountains, rivers, mud…in the jungle. We slept during the day because of the monitoring cameras […] In Sofia we waited at a secure spot for a car, that could bring us to Serbia. But there was a police raid taking place. […] When the police entered the room, they started to beat people. Some started to run, some remained seating. They have beaten up all people with sticks and pulled and pushed them into a car (Samir, 21 years, Afghanistan).

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Bulgaria: Still going to be a poor guardian of European’s External Borders

Publiziert am 21. Mai 2016 von mf

At the beginning of May 2016, Sofia and Ankara signed a protocol about returning migrants from Bulgaria back to Turkey from June the 1st, who crossed the border in an “illegal“ way. Since this protocol was never released, it is not clear what this means for the estimated 50 migrants, which are still arriving in Bulgaria on a daily basis to transit the country to Western Europe. The Signing was accelerated after the EU and Turkey sealed their controversial deal on returning refugees (on March 18 this year), which forced Brussels to make serious concessions to Ankara in an attempt to halt the migrant flow. Until now, it is not really clear if this deal could be implemented completely, as the European Union has already thought about a temporally suspending of the Visa agreement and Turkey for his part thought about opening its borders officially.

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Voenna Rampa: Living on the margins of society

Publiziert am 19. April 2016 von mf

The recent statement of the Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borissov, reported by the Focus News Agency that the situation in the Bulgarian refugee camps is perfect, can still not be confirmed. Today, poor living conditions are an ongoing issue in virtually all refugee camps, operated by the State Agency for Refugees (SAR), throughout the country. Literally many of the people living on the margins of Bulgaria’s society.

One example is the camp Voenna Rampa, located in the north of Sofia, a former abandoned school in a complex of former military barracks in an industrial area, which is hosting more than 400 asylum seekers, where is normally place for about 800 people. It seems, that at the moment, the influx of people fleeing through Bulgaria is increasing once again. Only in the last 1 1/2 weeks, 300 additional inhabitants were accommodated in the building.

Since the last two years a lot changed in the camp, especially in the maintenance of the buildings. During the last years, the building was renovated and thermal isolation as well as heating and windows were installed. In the yard a playground for children was built. The complex has now more toilet rooms than previously, but right now the showers can not be used, because they are out of work. People need to take a shower with a bucket. Especially in the corners of the toilets there is a lot of mildew and water damages. The toilets are on each floor directly next to the sleeping rooms, so people are exposed to these defects.

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Bulgarian state supports racist groups which are hunting for migrants

Publiziert am 13. April 2016 von mf

Since the private TV station bTV reported about people who are patroling with All-terrain vehicles through the border region of Bulgaria and calling their leader a national hero, more groups popped up in public which claim for arresting the migrants who crossed to Turkish-Bulgarian border. Although, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee called for prosecution of the case, the prime minister, Boyko Borissov, thanked in a statement these patrols:

I personally talked with them [the voluntary patrols] and thank them. I send the director of the Border Police to meet and coordinate with them.

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Legal and organizational problems in Bulgaria’s closed camps

Publiziert am 28. März 2016 von mf

At the moment, there are three camps of a closed type existing in Bulgaria. The buildings, which are administered from the Migration Directorate of the Ministry of Interior (MoI), provide 1,040 places: The Detention Center in Busmantsi has 400, the Detention Center in Lyubimets (since recently) 400 and the Detention Center in Elhovo has 240 places. In these accommodation facilities unaccompanied minors are being held illegally, which was reported by the Ombudsman some days ago. A recent statement, done by a team from the Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria (CLA), confirmed the report.

It [the CLA-Team] met a number of detained unaccompanied minors, whom the centre’s administration had listed as accompanied by a seemingly randomly chosen person who happened to be a part of the same group traveling together and smuggled into the country.[…]

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Breaking News: Two dead bodies found near Malko Tarnovo

Publiziert am 24. März 2016 von mf

On Wednesday, the 23rd of March at 11 a. m., the Border Police found two dead bodies at the near of Malko Tarnovo in the Mishkova Plains, one kilometer away from the Bulgarian-Turkish border. This was reported by the press office of the police in Burgas. The bodies of the two males, who likely “illegally“ crossed the border, which were already decayed were brought to Burgas hospital for an autopsy. The police could not find any papers with them and is currently investigating the case, said Lora Lyubenova a speaker of the Border Police. The last incident of this type came out in the open in February 2016, when two women froze to dead in the same region.

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Ministry of Interior searches new space for refugee camps

Publiziert am 23. März 2016 von mf

Recently, talks about accommodating refugees in a 200 square meters big old military barracks in Kresna (Blagoevgrad Province) triggered a large, and in some cases xenophobic, protest on the 21st of March, held by Bulgarian citizens in Kresna. About a thousand people gathered, when they heard that there is a possibility that asylum seekers could be accommodated soon in their town. Some of the protesters also threatened that next time they are going to block highway E-79, which is close to the town of Kresna, or the Greek border itself. In a report, done by bTV, a citizen stated:

I am afraid that they are coming as conquerors. They come to take our territories. […] We are Christians before everything else. I cannot imagine my granddaughter to be wearing a burka.

The Idea of opening a refugee camp in Kresna, which could be used in the case of a higher migration influx from Greece and Macedonia, was discussed between the Interior Minister Rumyana Bachvarova and the mayor of the town, Nikolay Georgiev. Later the people were assured by the authorities, that for now the unused building will not become a refugee center but it became clear that the Ministry of Interior (MoI) is generally looking for such buildings to create new centers and therefore discussed several options.

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