After the publication of video footage by Border Violence Monitoring2 on 16th December 2018 showing illegal collective expulsions of people on the move at the EU external border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, more serious allegations were raised against Croatian police officers from several sides.
By now our database contains more than 150 push-back reports from the Bosnian-Croatian border. In light of this figure it seems hard to deny this illegal practice of collective expulsions of people seeking protection, perpetrated by the Croatian police and often accompanied by violence.
This table lists all files Border Violence Monitoring received. The table is copied from the document „Proof of push backs”. Border Violence Monitoring added a link for every folder and file.
On Thursday, 22 November 2018, we received an e-mail from the spokesperson of the Police Directorate Novo Mesto, Slovenia, which they have asked us to publish on our website. We welcome this approach by the Slovenian Police, interpreting it as a sign of taking of responsibility. We believe this discussion can and should be of interest to the public and therefore decided to publish their e-mail. However, we could not refrain from adding some comments of our own. Here is the e-mail in full length, followed by the reply of the team behind Border Violence Monitoring:
We’re looking back at our approaches to bring Border Violence Monitoring to the European Parliament: In June 2018, a request was submitted by Dietmar Köster (MoP, S&D) in a meeting of the Committee of Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament. Köster questioned the role of Frontex in the context of human rights violations at the borders of Hungary, Croatia and Serbia. (See https://www.borderviolence.eu/border-violence-monitoring-goes-european-parliament/) We worked together with him preparing the request that was based on our database as well as material collected by other NGOs.