Frontex in Serbia — a catalogue of 12 months of denials

On 15 December 2023, Frontex’s Fundamental Rights Office (FRO) received a report from one of the agency’s officers deployed in Bulgaria.

The day before, the officer had come across a group of people 1.5km from the Serbian border; they were “exhausted”, some couldn’t move, and all of them had bruises, scratches and abrasions. Some had “fresh blood stains on their clothes”. They were disoriented, didn’t have any personal belongings with them, clearly weren’t properly dressed for the cold weather, and asked the officer where they were.

When he approached them, they were visibly afraid. They said they had been beaten and pushed back by Serbian border authorities.

The FRO, the border agency’s internal human rights watchdog, launched a Category 1 Serious Incident Report (SIR) - the most severe categorisation - and initiated an investigation into the involvement of Serbian officers in their pushback.

Serbian authorities swiftly denied it, insisting no such incident occurred. Yet the FRO’s findings indicated otherwise: in the context of  “allegations of collective expulsions and violence by Serbian officers at the Serbian-Bulgarian border” it was likely that the incident had taken place as described.

New, enhanced, collaboration

Frontex is ramping up its collaboration with Serbian authorities.

In June of this year, it signed a status agreement with Serbia to “strengthen migration and border management cooperation”, which former home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson has lauded as “excellent”.

In reality, Frontex’s agreement with Serbia is likely to give the stamp of approval to a path of escalating violence from Serbian authorities against people on the move.

The pushback last December wasn’t a one-off event.

The following week, on 23 December, a similar report came from another Frontex officer deployed in Bulgaria, this time the interviewee said he had been threatened with a handgun by Serbian border police who then beat him and his friend with iron knuckles.

Just a few days later, on 31 December, a third report came. Then a fourth, on 12 January 2024, where the interviewee recounted being forced to undress and left to walk barefoot for a day and a half.  

In each and every case, the Serbian authorities limited their investigation to checking internal logs to see that no incident had been recorded. They also sought to shift the blame, saying that the patterns which could be observed over multiple testimonies - similar numbers of people in the group, use of violence with police batons, and transfers in police cars - make the allegations sound like “instructions presented to the migrants by someone”. 

Noah Hatchwell from the NGO Border Violence Monitoring Network (BVMN), does not buy this defence: “patterns can corroborate allegations - not disprove them. The notion that different groups, speaking different languages, and transiting in different months have coordinated these claims against the Serbian border police is entirely implausible”.

Hatchwell, along with other researchers from BVMN, has been monitoring the escalation of violence, containment and pushbacks for people seeking to transit through the country.

After a shooting incident in the north of the country in October 2023, which left three people on the move dead and one seriously injured, the Serbian government launched a special police operation in the region of Vojvodina.

This saw up to 1,000 officers deployed - including joint units from Hungary and heavily armed Serbian Gendarmerie special military units - and 1,027 people apprehended in just the first two days.

The operation aimed at clearing the north of Serbia, along the Hungarian border, where large informal settlements in abandoned buildings housing up to 300 people at a time had developed over the last years. In October, people were violently evicted and taken to Temporary Reception Centres (RTCs) in the south and northwest of the country. 

By November 2023, local organisations were reporting the closure of Subotica, Sombor and Kikinda RTCs in the north. The camps to which people were transferred were filling up quickly, and the living conditions had become unbearable.

In Obrenovac Asylum Centre, just outside Belgrade, people were sleeping in the corridors, on the ground and in the stairwells in extremely cramped conditions. In Preševo, on the North Macedonian border, unaccompanied minors were sharing rooms with unrelated adults due to the lack of space. In March, the centres - which had historically always been open - became “closed facilities”, leaving those inside stranded in a state of de facto detention simply for seeking asylum in the country.

In January 2024, videos obtained by North Macedonian NGO Legis showed lines of semi-naked men passing through the village of Lojane, right on the Serbian border

By clearing the north, Serbian authorities had overwhelmed their capacities in the south, and it seems they had an idea on how to solve this.

In January 2024, videos obtained by North Macedonian NGO Legis showed lines of semi-naked men passing through the village of Lojane, right on the Serbian border. When asked, the men said they had been forced to strip naked by the Serbian authorities, who then forced them across the border into North Macedonia. 

Between July and October 2024, four more SIRs were investigated by the FRO bringing the total number of independent reports at the Serbian-Bulgarian border to 25 since December 2023.

In spite of continued requests for the Serbian authorities to investigate this practice properly, reports of violence continue to escalate.

This fits into the broader pattern of Frontex and the European Commission’s behaviour: systematic rights violations are ignored — whether they take place in the Aegean or Mediterranean seas, Bulgaria, Albania, Serbia or beyond — even when documented by the agency’s own internal mechanisms and deemed credible by their internal human rights watchdog. None of this impedes the expansion of Frontex’s presence, nor the negotiation of new deals with non-member states.

To MEP Alice Kuhnke, who is leading negotiations for the Greens/EFA group in the European Parliament on Frontex and Serbia’s updated status agreement, the hypocrisy is blatant: “it is unacceptable that the EU is planning to broaden its cooperation with Serbia in border management. The European Commission's own assessments and the latest FRO reports prove that fundamental rights and international law are being violated.”

Promises of reform under new executive director Hans Leijtens have failed to materialise as reports of serious violations across multiple borders persist.

While Frontex and the European Commission pay lip service to human rights concerns with fundamental rights monitors and impact assessments’, these mechanisms appear largely symbolic.

Reports highlighting abuses are dismissed when they conflict with the ‘Fortress Europe’ agenda.

It is time for Frontex and the commission to make a clear choice: drop the act or start taking these reports seriously by freezing EU funds to member states and third countries that systematically violate rights, and ending cooperation or new deals when such abuses come to light.