A Syrian refugee who secretly filmed Croatian border guards beating his travel companions is to take Croatia’s authorities to the European court of human rights in the first challenge to its practice of pushbacks into Bosnia.
“I couldn’t forget that experience at the border,” says Sami Barkal. “I made that video because I wanted people to understand what was happening to us and how they play with our lives as if they are worth nothing. What else can we do to make it stop? So I really have hopes in the court. Do we really want borders with walls, violence and pushbacks? Or do we want to find a more humane way?”
Barkal left Kobane, Syria, in 2014 when Kurdish villages began being bombed by Islamic State. He was 13 years old.
“I went with my mother and brother to Turkey,” Barkal recalls. “They returned after a while but I couldn’t go back because I was scared I would be forced to serve in the military. When my family left, that’s when life really started for me. I had to learn about life on my own.”
Barkal found a job in Turkey, working from 2am to 8pm harvesting and packing vegetables. When he realised he couldn’t continue like that, and suspecting he would not find work under more humane working conditions in Turkey, he decided to join the hundreds of asylum seekers walking the snowy paths of the Balkan route daily, trying to reach central Europe.
Many are stopped by Croatian border police and searched, with some robbed and violently pushed back into Bosnia, where thousands of asylum seekers are stranded in freezing temperatures.
Such pushbacks are a 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.
Barkal says: “The situation was disastrous. There was no support whatsoever, and we ended up sleeping in a muddy field. I had a tent, but many others had to improvise with bin bags. We relied on volunteers and locals for food and showers. I had to get out of there.”
In November 2018 Barkal decided to attempt to cross the border from Bosnia into Croatia with a group of asylum seekers from north Africa. Being the youngest in the group, the adults suggested he stay behind in case they were stopped by Croatian police. Suddenly he heard screams echoing through the cold night air. Hidden behind bushes, he began filming.
“The Croatian police are torturing them. They are breaking people’s bones,” Barkal whispered into his phone as the sound of truncheons striking flesh could be heard. Then silence. Minutes later, three men from his group emerged from the woods with bruised faces, bloody mouths and noses and broken ribs.
The Guardian was the first media outlet to publish the video which went viral and became one of the first pieces of evidence of the physical mistreatment of migrants by Croatian police.
Barkal says: “I was so scared because we had been heading in that direction. It could have been me. But I had to film some of it to make people understand what goes on at the border. At first we just heard the screams, and then this man came into view with his bleeding face. Then I had no more words. I was speechless. I was literally shaking. We left war and came here seeking safety, and then this happens. When the men came towards us, we tried to help them a bit and then walked back to the camp together. I was so scared, my legs could hardly move.”
This was not the first time Barkal had been forced to turn back. A month earlier, in October of the same year, he and a group of Syrians were stopped by Croatian border guards while resting in an abandoned building.
Barkal says: “The officers conducted a search on us and confiscated our belongings. Then we were escorted to a white van and driven back to the border. When the van doors were opened, we saw a group of armed police officers waiting outside. They motioned for us to move and didn’t say a word. We were too scared to speak. It dawned on us that they were forcibly sending us back to Bosnia. Back to living in that muddy field with nothing.”
After numerous attempts, Barkal finally managed to reach Germany at the end of 2018 where his claim for asylum was granted by the authorities.
Today he works at a supermarket in Norden, a town on Germany’s North Sea coast. After finishing school, he plans to pursue a career in nursing. However, Barkal has not forgotten the abuses he suffered. He has substantially contributed to trying to uncover what has been going on in Croatia, also speaking at the European parliament.
Carsten Gericke, a partner lawyer for the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR), an independent, nonprofit non-governmental organisation with the aim of enforcing human rights through legal means, represents Barkal and two other Syrians in their case in front of the European court of human rights. He says his clients explained how they were “subject to a collective expulsion” and “were not given a chance to explain their situation individually and were forced back together without any evaluation. Barkal also had no chance to challenge his return, and although he was a minor, officers sent him back to Bosnia without assessing the risks for him and in the full knowledge they were forcing him back into destitution in Bosnia, which had no effective asylum system at the time.”
Gericke adds that Barkal’s case “challenges Croatia’s pushback policy more broadly: Croatian officers routinely handle people outside of the framework of the law, making no official records of the presence of refugees and migrants on their territory, holding them in incommunicado detention and obstructing their access to asylum or any legal advice or support.”
According to ECCHR, Barkal’s case is exceptional, as many others have experienced similar situations, but only a few cases make it to international courts due to the logistical hurdles involved.
The court must now determine that Croatia violated Sami’s rights by illegally expelling him to Bosnia when he was a minor. In addition to this finding, Croatia would be required to guarantee that such violations do not occur again. They would need to develop an action plan and provide reports on its implementation.
Despite testimonies from aid workers, media and journalists, Croatia has consistently denied it pushed back asylum seekers to Bosnia or used violence against them.
However, in 2019, after months of official denials, in an interview with Swiss television, the then Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović appeared to admit the pushbacks were taking place. She denied they were illegal and also said police used force when doing so.
“I have spoken with the interior minister, the chief of police and officers on the ground, and they assured me that they have not used excessive force,” Grabar-Kitarović said, as reported from the interview. “Of course, some force is necessary during pushbacks.”
The ECHR ruled in 2019 that Croatian police were responsible for the death of a six-year-old Afghan girl. The authorities had forced her family to return to Serbia by crossing train tracks without allowing them to seek asylum.
The girl, named Madina Hussiny, was struck and killed by a train after being pushed back with her family by Croatian authorities in 2017.
