EU countries have become more violent toward migrants at borders, report says

EU countries have become increasingly violent toward migrants and asylum seekers at their borders, a report by the Border Violence Monitoring Network launched this Thursday together with the Left group in the European Parliament finds.

“We are beyond the point of denying that pushbacks exist. We have video evidence. We have footage, we have medical reports and over 1,000 testimonies, and this is just the data that we managed to collect,” Hope Barker, senior policy analyst for BVMN said at the report’s launch event in the European Parliament.

Activists from the human rights network talked to more than 700 individuals who tried to reach the EU in 2021 and 2022, and paint a grim picture of inhumane conditions at the EU borders, talking of “an unprecedented rise in violence.”

In 2021, only 5 percent of interviewees said they had not experienced or witnessed “excessive force” while being expelled from Europe.

Across more than 3,000 pages the network documented “how almost 25,000 people were beaten, kicked, humiliated and arbitrarily detained before being illegally pushed back, both at the EU’s external borders and from deep within the territory of its member states,” Barker said.

Cornelia Ernst, a German member of the Left group in the European Parliament, which commissioned the study, holds the European Commission directly accountable. She said, “the EU Commission is still inactive, not starting infringement procedures against member states who are pushing people back and denying them the right to asylum.”

EU and international law enshrines the right to claim asylum and not be forced back across a border to face war or persecution.

The publication builds on an earlier edition from 2020 that already contained more than 900 testimonies. This shows the violence continuing despite evidence presented to the public earlier, the authors say.

The authors add that media freedom is also targeted. Milena Zajovič, head of advocacy for BVMN, claimed that “criminalization is not only affecting the potential asylum seekers. It is also affecting those who are reporting on their hardship.”

The report comes two days after an investigation by several media outlets found that a young Syrian refugee was shot with live ammunition as he attempted to cross the border from Turkey to Bulgaria last October.

Source: Politico