Despite being only months away from assuming the Council of the EU presidency, Hungary continues to ignore warnings from the EU regarding its migration policy. It has effectively abolished its asylum system, "legalized" pushbacks and constructed an extensive border fence preventing entry into the country.

Since the summer of 2016, Hungarian authorities have been pushing undocumented migrants back to Serbia without verifying their identity or allowing them to seek asylum. This practice persists despite the Court of Justice of the European Union ruling on December 17, 2020 that it violates EU law.

The Hungarian government argues that migrants should submit their asylum claims in the first safe country they enter, rather than in Hungary and has made it near impossible to claim asylum on its soil.

The border fence was initially built along the southern border with both Serbia and Croatia at a cost of roughly 1.7 billion euros. When Croatia joined the Schengen area at the beginning of 2023, the section along the Croatia-Hungary border had to be dismantled. However, the 175-kilometer fence along the Serbian border remains.

Hungary has closed the southern border with Serbia, while keeping the Ukrainian border open. With escalating anti-migrant rhetoric and under the guise of protecting the EU's external borders, rights groups claim that Hungary's migration policy has also inadvertently boosted smuggling networks in the Balkans.

As a result, the situation at Hungary’s southern border with Serbia has since turned violent, with criminal gangs occupying border regions and migrants becoming increasingly vulnerable to exploitation.

Also read: Europe finds appeal in border fences once again

The rise of smuggling networks

Daniel Bagameri, head of IOM Hungary, told InfoMigrants that the Hungarian government attempts to justify the physical closure of its southern border with a fence to control the "inflow" of migrants and protect Europe.

Highlighting the adverse effects of this closed border policy, he noted the rise of a lucrative smuggling network as crossing the border becomes more expensive and dangerous.

Milica Švabić from Klikaktiv, a Serbian NGO, has observed the same phenomenon. "Smugglers became very crucial in this whole story, because it was impossible for people to cross the border in any other way," she said. "There was no humanitarian corridor, no tolerated or legal way for people to leave Serbia and enter the EU."

According to the executive director of the Asylum Protection Center (APC), Radoš Đurović, Hungary and Austria’s bilateral initiatives with Serbia are aimed at diverting migration pressure from Hungarian and EU borders to Serbia.

Đurović compares the policy to that of Italy, which recently agreed a deal with Albania and is in talks to develop a similar agreement with Tunisia, "to organize some kind of a buffer zones to protect their own external borders." He also points to Hungary and Austria trying to engage Serbia as a partner in "taking on the burden of irregular migration and management of migration."

But he notes that little attention from the Serbian and European public was paid to the fact that, with a border fence and a huge amount of money and force engaged to stop migration on Serbian-Hungarian border, "we're not producing anything else, but a boost in smuggling."

Also read: Seeking asylum in Hungary: Does the current system violate European asylum law?

Criminal gangs

The tightening of border controls has also given rise to more violence. Švabić notes that a shooting at the Hungary-Serbia border last October was not the first. Since 2022, such incidents of gun violence have become common. "Every two or three months, there was a shooting in these informal settlements," she says.

Švabić explains that rival criminal groups fighting over territory, clients and money had led to the shootings and to people dying in the border areas.

Following the violence, it became evident that the pushbacks on the Hungarian side and the border fence were "actually producing smuggling, not fighting it," says Radoš Đurović.

Serbia's official Country-profile on Migrant Smuggling, published by the Council of Europe, describes smugglers as "armed criminal groups made up of migrants themselves who are engaged in smuggling other migrants." 

However, Đurović claims that smugglers in Serbia tend not to be migrants themselves, but rather local citizens, or criminal networks that existed before. They previously "smuggled weapons or drugs, and are now smuggling people." To fight organized smuggling in a climate of pushbacks from Hungary, when people are willing to pay a high price, is very difficult, he says.

Đurović's impression from working in the field is that "whole villages or small communities around the borders are involved in smuggling," especially people in a difficult economic situation.

For example, they may be engaged in smuggling as drivers or they might be providing some kind of accommodation. "Smuggling provides opportunities for people to earn a lot of money in a short period of time," he says. 

Švabić also points out that the local population in these villages and cities in the north usually have extreme anti-migrant attitudes, mainly because they constantly see people traveling in bigger groups, and they would hear shootings between criminal groups. This led to people feeling unsafe in this area, she says.

However, she adds that many local people are unaware of who is actually at the root of the deteriorating situation at the border, so they are unlikely to pressure the Serbian government to make changes, leaving much of the smuggling activity unreported.

Informal camps

Informal settlements or "squats" along the Hungary-Serbia border appeared for the first time in 2019 and were organized by refugees themselves, according to Švabić.

These squats were mostly occupied by single adult men, she notes, because this area is close to the border, "so you can try to proceed and then if you're pushed back, you can stay there for one or two nights and then try to cross the border again."

However, as the situation became more dangerous, and with more and more refugees coming to Serbia, this became a "quite lucrative business". And then slowly the smugglers and criminal groups took over these informal settlements.

At the end of last year, KlikAktiv observed more than 40 informal camps alongside the Serbia-Hungary border. These squats are usually in isolated locations, says Švabić: "It can be tents in the woods, or some abandoned factories or buildings." They are always far removed from the local population so as not to be visible.

According to Švabić, they are completely run and organized by smugglers. "The problem is that people don't feel safe when they're in Serbia. We have also started seeing more pushbacks happening from Serbian territory."

Švabić explains that a lack of access to official camps in Serbia means that many people depend on smugglers during their stay in Serbia as well. "They don't hire smugglers just to cross the border, but also during their stay here."

The informal camps tend to be barely liveable, says Švabić. "Unfortunately, a lot of people were staying in really rough conditions," she said, adding that many were left without enough food or basic hygiene and were exposed to infectious diseases. Another problem in these camps was a lack of reliable information, with migrants often being lied to and not knowing what to expect, according to Švabić.

Also read: Serbia police deny beating up migrants at North Macedonia border

Invisible migrants

At the end of 2023, Serbian authorities removed people from the squats in an attempt to "clean up" the area before the national elections on December 17.

Aniko Bakonyi from the Hungarian Helsinki Committee tells InfoMigrants that the police "rounded people up, put them into buses and then transported them down to two different camps in the south of Serbia." This was a counter-measure, because they wanted the local population to feel safe, she says.

The situation in northern Serbia along the Hungarian border had deteriorated significantly, explains Švabić. As a result, Serbian authorities were forced to act due to escalating violence among smuggling groups, which led to public demand for intervention. 

However, Bakonyi notes that although this happened in the run-up to the elections, "it seems that these measures are still in place to some extent." She observes that the Serbian authorities seem to have continued with increased police control in the border area.

Švabić points out that official camps are now nearly empty, but large numbers of people are still entering Serbia. With reduced visibility in both official camps and informal settlements, it's possible that smugglers have relocated people to private accommodation, increasing their vulnerability to exploitation.

"Unfortunately, this will only make people even less safe," says Švabić, noting that in these informal settlements, at least the NGOs have access to them and they can get some sort of help and assistance. However, "when they're completely invisible, they are exposed to different kinds of exploitation."

Đurović notes that they "cut the chains and connections between these smuggling networks and arrested most prominent smugglers."

This is not a long term fix, he says. While the measures may reach the "most prominent smuggling networks for a short period of time…smuggling will recuperate, it will reorganize and start again."

Also read: Serbian police detain over 4,500 migrants in raids

Bulgaria and Romania joined Schengen on March 31, 2024, which may impact both migration routes and pushbacks.

InfoMigrants contacted both the National Directorate-General for Aliens Policing and the Hungarian Interior Ministry for an interview, both declined to provide any comment on Hungarian migration policy.

Rama Jarmakani contributed reporting in this article.