Today, Thursday, July 23th 2020, the Centre for Peace Studies filed one more criminal complaint to the State Attorney's Office in Zagreb against the unknown perpetrators due to well-founded suspicion that at the end of May they tortured, humiliated and pushed back 16 refugees from the territory of the Republic of Croatia to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Civil initiative Info Kolpa, a key member of the Border Violence Monitoring Network, are sharing here the landmark judgement issued on 16th July 2020 by the Slovenian Administrative Court. The findings prove that the national police force carried out an illegal collective expulsion of a member of a persecuted English-speaking minority from Cameroon who wanted to apply for asylum in Slovenia.
The Centre for Peace Studies (CMS) has launched a campaign called #ovdježivimo (#welivehere) within Refugee Weeks in Croatia to share the stories of refugees who have found their new home in Croatia about their integration in the new environment.
Today, Centre for Peace Studies filed a criminal complaint to the State Attorney's Office in Zagreb against the unknown perpetrators police officers based on a reasonable doubt of degrading treatment and torture of 33 people and their violent, illegal expulsion from the territory of the Republic of Croatia to Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Over 90 leading civil society organisations from the Western Balkans and EU member states, active in areas of fundamental rights and the rule of law, democratic institutions, civic engagement, environment protection, combating corruption and migrant rights have, during their online shadow summit held on 5 May 2020, adopted a common declaration titled With or Without (E)U?.
Five people, five life stories, one goal.
Ahead of the informal meeting of European Foreign Affairs Ministers, Centre for Peace Studies, Are You Syrious, Welcome Initiative and Forum 2020 warned that the EU has to urgently adopt sustainable and humane solutions for the humanitarian crisis at the Greece-Turkey land border, as well as on Greek islands and other external borders of the EU. A banner with the message “For Open Europe” was displayed at the press conference.
The NGOs Centre for Peace Studies and Are You Syrious, sent an open letter to Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, on behalf of Forum2020, asking him to push for a reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS).
Together with a number of NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Are You Syrious / Centre for Peace Studies, and Amnesty International, the Border Violence Monitoring Network has been working to document illegal pushbacks and police violence along the EU’s external borders in the Western Balkans since the formal closure of the route in 2017. While the existence of systematic illegal pushbacks along the Croatian and Hungarian borders with Serbia and Bosnia is evidenced extensively, this report focuses on the increasing violence that is applied to refugees and migrants under the framework of the Croatian case.
