“I thought how beautiful shoes are, there can never be ugly shoes in this world, all shoes are beautiful” – the words of A.H., an Afghan citizen granted humanitarian status in Bulgaria, pushed back in a particularly humiliating way to the territory of Turkey on 27-28 April this year, forced to walk barefoot with bleeding…
Commentary from Desislava Todorova – Lawyer and Board member of Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria The withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan and the subsequent abrupt takeover by the Taliban in the summer of 2021 triggered an increase of asylum applications (Актуална информация | ДЪРЖАВНА АГЕНЦИЯ ЗА БЕЖАНЦИТЕ (government.bg)) of Afghani nationals…
Commentary from Diana Radoslavova – Director of Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria Since the beginning of 2022, more than 150 reports of unlawful practices of forcible repulsion of asylum-seekers from the territory of Bulgaria, the so-called push-backs, have been received by the „Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria“ (CLA) and…
In 2022, Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria and “Mission Wings” started to collect evidence of push-backs of asylum seekers from Bulgaria to Turkey, perpetrated by border officials. This video (in Arabic with English subtitles) contains a small part of the collected stories and will be followed by further materials documenting the human…
(Brussels) – Bulgarian authorities are beating, robbing, stripping, and using police dogs to attack Afghan and other asylum seekers and migrants, then pushing them back to Turkey without any formal interview or asylum procedure, Human Rights Watch said today. “Bulgarian authorities are brutally and summarily pushing back migrants and asylum seekers across the land border with Turkey,”…
(Published also in Bulgarian here. We thank Deian Vladov for the courtesy translation) “The inrush of the COVID-19 pandemic has completely shifted away the focus from human rights and, in the context of survival, the fight for rights is now harder and even “inhumane”. “The right to health is not contrary to human rights altogether…
Earlier this summer, the CLA published the report “Applying Engagement-Based Alternatives to Detention of Migrants in Bulgaria: Opportunities and Challenges”. The report is based on the work implementing the 2-year project “Protecting Migrants with Precarious Status: Decreasing the use of Detention and Applying Community-Based Alternatives”, funded by the European Programme for Integration and Migration (EPIM). From…
Detention of migrants is a practice used extensively by authorities across Europe, even though “the use of detention for the purpose of removal should be limited […] and if the application of less coercive measures would not be sufficient,” according to the ‘Return Directive’. The European Programme for Integration and Migration (EPIM), co-created by the…
“The scale and normalisation of pushbacks at Europe’s borders requires urgent and concerted action by governments and parliamentarians”, said today Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, while releasing a Recommendation to member states’ governments and parliamentarians outlining the widespread occurrence of pushbacks and related human rights violations at land and sea…
by Radostina Pavlova, radostinapav@gmail.com On April 12, 2019, the Bulgarian National Assembly voted in second reading to adopt a Bill to Amend and Complement the Law on Foreigners in R. Bulgaria (LFRB) (in Bulgarian). In addition to the LFRB, the Bill will see changes of some of the provisions of the Law on Asylum and…
The Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria was invited to provide input to the United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) for its upcoming session to examine the 6th report of Bulgaria. The meeting with NGOs will take place on 21 February in Geneva. In its submission, the CLA highlights six…
by Andreas Aravossitas The Council of Europe (COE) has recently published two reports on Bulgaria, after sending delegations in the end of 2017 to observe and report on the situation of asylum seekers, migrants and other foreign nationals in Bulgaria. These delegations produced two very enlightening reports on the current situation in Bulgarian administrative detention…
by Andreas Aravossitas Canada is often regarded as an exemplary industrialized democracy that excels at handling immigration issues and is welcoming to refugees and migrants. The truth, however, is far from perfect in relation to detention of irregular migrants and asylum seekers. While there are certain areas where Canada’s immigration detention system appears to be fair,…
Narek arrives in Bulgaria when he is 6 months old with his mother and spends his entire life in Bulgaria. He is now 23 years old. His native language is Bulgarian, he graduated from a Bulgarian school and Bulgaria is the only country he considers his home. He is Bulgarian by all natural laws, but in…
by Radostina Pavlova, Center for Legal Aid – Voice in Bulgaria Bulgaria has assumed the Presidency of the Council of the EU at a pivotal moment in European policy making in the area of migration and asylum. Thus, there is truth to the words of Jean-Claude Juncker spoken before the European Parliament Plenary on January 17,…
