When he woke up in the hospital, Karim* had no idea what had happened to him. All he remembered was that he had fallen asleep next to his friend, Yousef*, in the back of the car. Days before, in the summer of 2022, they had climbed the border fence between Serbia and Hungary and were heading towards Austria.
Karim, 22, had left his home in northern Syria at the end of 2021. After making his way from Turkey through Bulgaria, he reached Serbia. From there he still had to cross Hungary and then on to Austria. “My dream was to reach Germany,” he says.
Every night, hundreds of refugees use ladders to cross the six-metre-high fence between Serbia and Hungary, which is heavily monitored and topped by razor wire.
Getting over the fence is the first obstacle. Since 2015, human rights organisations have documented violence perpetrated by Hungarian police during so-called pushbacks, including beatings and dog attacks. Courts ruled Hungary had breached international and EU law by legalising pushbacks.
Now, the rights groups say, they have found a number of migrants injured in car crashes involving the Hungarian police over the past year.
At least four crashes involving car chases have been discovered by rights organisations working in Serbia over the past year and a search of Hungarian media since June 2021, by the Guardian, found a further 20 cases involving migrants that reported either police chases before the accident or a driver having tried to evade the police control before the accident.
The doctor treating Karim spoke Arabic and explained that he had been in a car accident and had been in a coma for almost a week. “I remember I was asleep in the car, so I was not sure if we really had an accident. But then I am in the hospital bed and I cannot move at all,” Karim recalls.
Karim was later told that Hungarian police appeared just 20 minutes from the Austrian border and chased the vehicle, which had 18 people in it. “Our driver got scared but he would not surrender because if he did he will have a problem, so his only chance was to turn the car around,” says Karim.
The car hit a crash barrier, killing two, including Yousef. “We were both sleeping,” he says. “How did he die and I didn’t?”
Elisabeth Jennings, who worked with Medical Volunteers International (MVI), an organisation that supports refugees and migrants in northern Serbia, says car crashes are becoming a regular occurrence.
“In July, when we first heard about this, we thought it was a very exceptional case,” she says. But once the organisation started following Hungarian news and hearing stories of several victims who had been in separate accidents “we saw it’s actually happening all the time”.
Ahmad, 24, from Morocco, was crammed in the back of a van with 18 other refugees when police tried to stop them as they travelled across Hungary last December. When the driver did not comply, the police rammed the car several times. The driver veered off the highway and on to a dirt road to escape but crashed head-on into a tree.
After 16 days in a Hungarian hospital, Ahmad was discharged but was only able to walk using crutches. Police picked him up, drove him to the border and forced him to go back to Serbia. They kept his phone and money they had taken from him.
Amer*, 40, from Syria, was severely injured in a car crash in Hungary last November. He told MVI that police in a black 4x4 chased and hit the vehicle he was in, causing it to overturn. Amer was thrown out of the car.
Police pointed their guns at them, stripped them of their clothes and left them lying in the cold for 40 minutes until an ambulance arrived, he says. Among the injured was at least one child.
At the hospital, Amer says he was handcuffed to the bed and left without treatment or medicine to ease the pain of several fractures.
Karim had feared he would be returned to Serbia, despite trying to lodge his asylum claim in Hungary with the help of a human rights organisation he contacted while in the hospital. But before they could send someone to the hospital to help with the application, Karim was pushed back to Serbia.
“The police came to my room in the hospital to ask how I was,” he says. The following day, they came back and handcuffed Karim, who was still unable to move his arm and had to wear a brace for his injured neck.
The officer asked Karim to stand up and refused to help when he was unable to sit up. Karim called the doctor, who spoke Arabic. “He told me: ‘Karim, it’s done, they will deport you.’”
According to Hungarian police, more than 158,000 pushbacks were carried out in 2022 and more than 60,000 from January to mid-August this year. Jennings says migrants who end up in hospital are tracked by the police.
In the second half of 2022, rights groups working in northern Serbia documented 40 pushbacks from hospitals in Hungary, of which at least 13 people had been injured in car crashes.
In 2023, they met 12 people who had been pushed back from hospitals, five of whom had been in a car accident. The organisations neither meet everyone returned from Hungary nor do they systematically document these cases. “These numbers are definitely not exhaustive,” a volunteer said.
While Karim received treatment for some of his injuries, Jennings says she saw cases in which people “with life-threatening or severe injuries have been pushed back directly”. She explains that those who received treatment in Hungary were often not provided with information or translations. “So even if the care was good, you come back in a condition that you don’t really understand.”
With a chain tied to his handcuffs, Karim, who was barely able to walk, followed the officers to the car. He was taken to a police station before being taken to the Serbian border. “They threw me out in a forest. I started walking until I reached a road. I was so hungry and thirsty, and in pain, I had to take a break every 10 minutes. But I had no option, I will not die at the border.”
Amer was pushed back after a few hours in the hospital and threatened by police officers to keep quiet about the car chase that caused the accident. He told MVI he was barely able to walk because of the pain and was beaten once more by police officers at the border before they forced him back to Serbia.
In Serbia, many refugees and migrants stay in ruins or tents with limited access to running water, electricity or any way to keep warm. In state-run refugee camps, people sleep in crowded halls stuffed with bunk beds.
When Karim finally arrived at the camp near the city of Sombor, his cousin was waiting for him. “I didn’t want to eat, just to sleep,” he says.
Jennings says that in these conditions, “people often put their health second and their journey first” and have no access to asylum or necessary medical care.
“The doctor told me that my shoulder and part of my spine are broken and that I am in a bad situation,” Karim recalls. “He told me to stop smoking and take care of myself.”
Soon after, however, Karim left for Hungary again. With the help of friends, he crossed the fence and walked three hours into Hungarian territory where – once again – a car picked them up. “During the whole ride, I didn’t sleep, because the last time, during the accident I was asleep,” he says.
After finally arriving in Germany, Karim received a notice that he should be deported to Bulgaria under the “Dublin regulation”, which states that asylum seekers have to remain in the first European Union country they enter. Karim spent six months hiding in church asylum before receiving a temporary residence permit in Germany.
The Hungarian interior ministry and border control authorities were contacted but did not respond to requests for comment.
* Names have been changed
• Marlene Auer is part of an ifa.de programme assisting civil society journalists around the world
