Croatia’s border police force appear to be burning clothing, mobile phones and passports seized from asylum seekers attempting to cross into the European Union before pushing them back to Bosnia.
A report with photographs of burnt belongings, along with testimonies of sexual assault and beatings meted out by the police, shared with the Guardian by the humanitarian organisation No Name Kitchen (NNK), are the latest alleged evidence of brutality against people migrating at EU borders.
Every day, thousands of people from south Asia, the Middle East and north Africa, and, increasingly, China, attempt to cross the Balkans heading for the EU. There are few facilities, with people forced to spend most of the difficult journey in makeshift camps or train stations.
Many are stopped by Croatian border police and searched, with some reportedly robbed and violently pushed back into Bosnia, where thousands of asylum seekers can be stranded in often freezing temperatures.
Such pushbacks are an apparent violation of international law, which states that asylum seekers must have the opportunity to file their request for asylum once they are within a country’s borders.
NNK has detailed the locations of eight large “burn piles” where Croatian police officers allegedly incinerated people’s personal belongings and documents they need to apply for asylum once they reach the EU.
Burnt smartphones could also contain evidence of abuses carried out by the Croatian police in the form of videos and photos taken by asylum seekers, said NNK.
NNK travelled to the Bosnia-Croatia border at the end of 2023 and in early 2024 to find evidence of burn piles mentioned in the testimonies of people pushed back from the border, but which it had not previously verified.
The organisation identified the sites in areas known for pushbacks and documented ID cards, half-burnt bags, hundreds of phones, shoes, glasses, official government documents, power banks, money and other everyday objects that corroborate the testimonies.
It also collected testimonies of alleged violence by the border police.
In December 2023, a 23-year-old pregnant Moroccan woman said that she was sexually assaulted by Croatian officers before the guards burned her belongings, along with items of other members of her group.
The woman, who was travelling with her husband, another woman and three minors, said that a border guards subjected her to an invasive strip-search, including inside her genitalia, and threatened to rape her.
The search “was the worst thing to happen to me”, the woman said. “I prefer he beat me than to search me in that way.”
After the group was released by the guards and ran back into Bosnia, she said she saw the officers burning the items that had been confiscated from them.
According to another testimony, from November 2023, a group of four Moroccan men were allegedly beaten by police officers who then burned their belongings.
The police allegedly forced the men to walk barefoot over the hot ashes, threatening them with batons. According to NNK, the Moroccan man who provided the testimony sustained burns on the soles of his feet.
Despite testimonies from aid workers and journalists, Croatia has consistently denied it has pushed back asylum seekers to Bosnia or used violence against them. NNK recently made a submission to the UN’s special rapporteur on torture with its evidence.
A spokesperson for Croatia’s interior ministry said it had a “a zero-tolerance policy for any potential illegal activities committed by its personnel”, and that it had an independent mechanism for supervising police conduct.
Regarding the testimonies from the pregnant woman and the group of four Moroccan men, the spokesperson said: “It is totally inconceivable that such an incident would occur without being reported to the police right away.”
The spokesperson said that it was often people smugglers who were responsible for violence and theft at the border, and that the police had documented “many instances of fabricated claims”.
“Regarding claims that Croatian police are burning items that they have confiscated from migrants, we would like to let you know that, in order to avoid being returned to Croatia as applicants for international protection, migrants sometimes destroy items they carry with them and discard personal belongings when attempting to cross the border illegally,” the spokesperson said.
In 2019, after months of official denials, in an interview with Swiss television, the then Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović appeared to admit to the pushbacks. She admitted that police used force, but denied the pushbacks were illegal.
In 2021, the European court of human rights ruled that Croatian police were responsible for the death of a six-year-old Afghan girl, Madina Hussiny, who together with her family was forced to return to Serbia by crossing train tracks. She was struck and killed by a train.
• This article was amended on 10 October 2024 to correct the year of the European court of human rights’ ruling to 2021.
