organization:bulgarian border police

Bulgaria’s Border Police cooperates with hunters

One could think it was just a bad coincidence when a group of 19 hunters met a group of refugees near the Turkish-Bulgarian border, near of the village of Evrenozovo (near Malko Tarnovo) last Saturday. After the hunters called the police, the group of 30 migrants was arrested by the Bulgarian border police. On the very same day, hundreds of right wing protesters walked on the streets of Sofia to support the police officer that shot the Afghani man.
Only a few days later Venko Kalinchev, the secretary of the hunting and fishing association Elen (Deer) in Kyustendil stated that there is a close working together with the Bulgarian Border Police and in the region of the village of Dolno Kobile (near Kjustendil), several groups were detected by the hunters. That statement was made not even one week after the fatal shooting of a young Afghan man in the Bulgarian forest.

Meanwhile volunteers at the Serbian city of Dimitrovgrad, close to the Serbian-Bulgarian border report about “multiple independent reports of police robbing, beating, and imprisoning refugees“ in Bulgaria. Due to the fence people walk long distances through the mountains and forests to reach Sofia and afterwards the borders of Serbia. At the moment about 200 people cross the Serbian border on a daily basis.

▻http://bulgaria.bordermonitoring.eu/2015/10/22/bulgarias-border-police-cooperates-with-hunters
#migrations #asile #réfugiés #contrôles_migratoires #chasseurs #Bulgarie
signalé par @reka

Still no good life for refugees in Bulgaria

The situation for refugees in Bulgaria still exhibits extreme social vulnerability. As the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee (BHC) and the European Council on Refugees (ECRE) pointed out in a report from January 2015 the push-backs, the lack of integration and discrimination against asylumseekers in Bulgaria are continuing. Meanwhile, the Bulgarian Defense Ministry deployed troops on the Bulgarian-Turkish border and Boyko Borisov, Bulgaria’s Prime Minister announced the extension of the fence project, which will now comprise 331 km.

Violent #push-backs at the border are still taking place. One such violation of international norms took place on March 25 as a result of which Mohammed Jawad Kadima (30) and Elias Murad (35) died after freezing to death because of their impossibility to move while sustaining severe injuries on their limbs. A witness of the incident says the following about his experience with the Bulgarian Border Police:

We were 12 people. At the border we got arrested. They beaten us, massively. The bulgarian police took our mobiles, our money that they could find and all objects of value. One of the refugees was not able to walk and his legs couldn’t carry him anymore. The police called us to go back to Turkey. We returned to Turkey.

We remind our readers that violent push-backs often take place at the border. For more information, read our report from July 2014.

▻http://bulgaria.bordermonitoring.eu/2015/03/24/still-no-good-life-for-refugees-in-bulgaria
#Bulgarie #asile #migration #réfugiés #barrière_frontalière #mur #refoulement #Turquie