Since the refugee crisis of 2015 and 2016, which represent milestones in the management of migration in Europe, and especially in the Balkans, there has been a tightening of border control, both the external borders of the European Union (specifically the borders of Croatia, Hungary and Romania) and within the EU among member states, with the aim of controlling, slowing down and preventing irregular migration.

One of the extremely bad practices that has unfortunately become established when discouraging people from migrating along the Balkan route has become the illegal pushing of refugees from one country to a neighboring country from where they entered, in violation of the procedures provided by law and international and / or bilateral agreements. the practice of implementing push-backs.

In the middle of 2016, these were sporadic cases, about which only a few of the refugees were ready to talk.
Today and in 2020, the situation is such that in Serbia there is almost no person who entered Serbia without experiencing a push-back by the border police of neighboring countries, such as Hungary, Croatia and Romania, and there are those who have experienced “Chain push-backs” or “chain pushes”, ie. were push-thrown from one neighboring country to another and so through a series of several neighboring countries as a domino effect along the Balkan migration route.

Find out more about push back practices on Serbia’s northern borders in our report.

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  Report on "Push backs" on the northern borders of Serbia in 2020.