Media freedom continues to stand perilously close to breaking point in many EU countries and in some, it needs to be almost completely revived, Liberties’ Media Freedom Report 2024 finds.
On 10 April 2024, the European Parliament adopted the New Pact on Migration and Asylum, a package of reforms expanding the criminalisation and digital surveillance of migrants. Despite civil society organisations’ repeated warnings, the Pact “will normalise the arbitrary use of immigration detention, including for children and families, increase racial profiling, use ‘crisis’ procedures to enable pushbacks, and return individuals to so called ‘safe third countries’ where they are at risk of violence, torture, and arbitrary imprisonment”.
Dear colleagues, the Centre for Peace Studies office will be closed from April 1st to April 7th, and during this period, free legal assistance will not be available.
The rule of law in the EU continued to deteriorate in 2023, as governments further weakened legal and democratic checks and balances, according to the newly published Liberties Rule of Law Report 2024.
The return of a very large number of refugees from Austria to Croatia, as many as 1,700 refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, has been announced. These are the refugees who came to Austria via the so-called Balkan refugee route.
The GOOD initiative which advocates the introduction of civics in schools, has sent 22 requests to political stakeholders asking them to voice their opinion about them ahead of the early parliamentary election.
In December 2015, in the middle of the so-called “refugee crisis“, the European Commission has proposed to set up a European Border and Coast Guard Authority (EBCGA) as one of the key measure “to protect Europe's external Borders“. The aim declared by the Commission was a better management of migration, and the need “to offer a high level of security within the Union, while safeguarding the free movement of persons therein“.
The Centre for Peace Studies and GONG NGOs on Monday condemned last week's violence of some football fans but also calls for lynching hooligans, saying the Croatian Football Federation (HNS) was poorly run and calling on President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic to publicly declare her personal, social, political and business ties to the HNS and controversial football manager Zdravko Mamic.
Representatives of civil associations from Croatia and Serbia, who gathered in Zagreb on Monday for a public debate on the occasion of World Refugee Day, said that political and legal circumstances in Europe were developing to the detriment of refugee human rights.
