Brussels, 29/04/2014 (Agence Europe) - In a report published on Tuesday 29 April, the American NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) accuses Bulgaria of turning away large numbers of refugees, violently in some cases, at its border with Turkey. The NGO recommends that the EU agree on a common position to “promote the equitable sharing of the burden of refugees among EU member states”.
“People have been forced back across the border without proper procedures and with no opportunity to lodge asylum claims”, HRW alleges in a report based on witness statements by illegal migrants. “Bulgaria should end summary expulsions at the Turkish border, stop the excessive use of force by border guards, and improve the treatment of detainees and conditions of detention”, the NGO stresses.
In 2013, Bulgaria was caught offguard when 11,000 refugees arrived in the country, a number which was far higher than the country's reception capacity. Most were Syrian civilians fleeing war in their country via Turkey. In order to deal with this influx, the government deployed 1,300 police officers along its border with Turkey from November of last year and started work on building a 35-kilometre barbed wire fence, measures which have been criticised by an United Nations High Commission for Refugees (HCR) and by the European Commission. “Slamming the door on refugees is not the way to deal with an increase in people seeking protection”, says Bill Frelick, refugee rights programme director at HRW. The NGO has interviewed 177 refugees or asylum seekers on both sides of the border between Bulgaria and Turkey. Of these, 41 migrants reported 44 cases concerning at least 519 people who had been turned back by the Bulgarian border police, sometimes violently.
Bulgarian Home Affairs Minister Tsvetlin Yovtchev rejected these accusations, stressing that representatives of Frontex, the European external borders agency, were present on the border. The director of the refugees agency, Nikolai Chirpanliev, said that he was “outraged” by the claims and describes the events referred to in the report as “provocations by Turkish smugglers” (our translation).
According the figures from the head of the border police, Zaharin Penov, 400 asylum seekers, 90% of whom were Syrian, have reported to the posts on the Turkish border since the start of the year. This figure is down considerably compared to the second half of 2013, when 1,000 asylum seekers were arriving in Bulgaria each month. (LC)