A recent report on Slovenia's policies concerning the return of migrants to Croatia highlights the obstacles they face in accessing asylum procedures, in potential violation of the principle of non-refoulement, according to the networks of NGOs European Asylum on Refugees and Exile (ECRE).
The organization said in a statement that the report was published by the Legal-Informational Centre for non-governmental organizations (PIC) of Slovenia, after the visit of Velika Kladua and Biha, to Bosnia-Herzegovina, at the end of June 2018, during which a number of people who had returned to Croatia and then Bosnia from Slovenia had been interviewed.
In June 2018, Slovenia increase the number of immigrants who were forced to return to Croatia as part of a bilateral readmission accord. According to official data, 885 people were arrested for entering the country illegally and 652 were forced to return to the neighboring country in June, compared to the 1,158 people who were arrested and the 148 who were returned in May. A drop in asylum requests was also reported that month.
Reports on violations
ECRE said in a statement that in its report PIC documented cases of people who were forced to return to Bosnia although they had expressed the intention of applying for asylum when crossing the Croatia-Slovenia border and the fact that they had not been granted access to the procedure. Some of the interviews were carried out by Slovenian police in English, without guaranteeing an interpreter, in spite of the fact that some people did not understand the language enough. In two reported cases, police records after the detention of migrants explicitly stated the reasons why these people were fleeing their home country, including persecution and armed conflict.
In spite of this, police did not give the migrants information on how to access asylum procedures, which were only provided in some cases when the migrants returned to Croatia. In other cases, migrants were told it was not possible to apply for asylum in Slovenia. PIC also reported that unaccompanied minors were forced to return to Croatia from Slovenia without a preliminary evaluation of their best interests and guarantees of appropriate assistance in Croatia, as required by the law.