By Esme Smithson Swain
Europe’s borders have become sites of systematic violations of the fundamental right to asylum – and European institutions like border forces and Frontex are the systematic perpetrators. Despite the modern right to asylum being enshrined in law since 1951, recent years have seen a growing trend in restrictive policies and systematic pushbacks.
A 22-year-old Syrian man reported that during an extremely violent pushback on 19th December, 2023, one of the group tried to make a request for asylum, but the police officers told him to shut up and kept hitting them. Then he reports the officers tried to force them to sign untranslated papers, and when they refused they were beaten further. The officers forced them back into Serbia, reportedly saying;
“Go back to Syria because if we catch you next time we will kill you”.
Stories such as this are becoming increasingly common, including the manipulation of bureaucratic structures like forcing people to sign documents with no translator present. Sometimes these documents are requests for asylum (even if the person does not want to claim asylum there), but sometimes it is admittances of guilt, or even testimonies against other people or so-called ‘smugglers’.
We received a very violent report from a 23 -year -old pregnant woman, who reported that on the 26th January, 2024, she was violently pushed back with 6 other people from Croatia to Bosnia. The police violently beat a 14-year-old boy also, with one officer holding his feet on the boy’s head whilst he begged. She reports that the officers kept asking the boy a question he didn’t know the answer to, so he replied ‘no, no, no”, so they beat the child until his answer changed to ‘yes’. She reports:
They held a gun to the head of one child, and asked “Are you going back to Croatia?” whilst he replied “no, no , no, please do not hit me again”.
Throughout the report, she states that more people were beaten, and the respondent was sexually assaulted and the officer threatened to rape her. She states:
“I wish they had beaten me instead”.
Yet in April 2024, the right to asylum came violently under attack not just on the borders but from the EU Parliament in Brussels. Many of our concerns have already become reality: the use of ‘accelerated’ asylum procedures undermines the right to asylum on paper, but now through harrowing testimonies of violence, torture, sexual assault, and degradation, we see that these ‘accelerated’ procedures are also resulting in mass abuse on Europe’s borders.
The asylum system reforms from Brussels have already had devastating impacts on the right to asylum on Europe’s borders. By imposing arbitrary and sometimes impossible requirements, police and border officers systematically undermine the right to asylum – and are legitimated to do so by this year’s changes to the common migration and asylum system. The bureaucratic system is weaponised to evade the right to asylum and perpetuate human rights abuses.
