In “Forgotten at the gates of Europe” JRS Europe documents how migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees experience Europe’s borders. Throughout 2017, we interviewed people in Croatia, Greece, Italy, Malta, Romania, and the Spanish enclave of Melilla – locations that represent many peoples’ first points of contact with EU territory.
The report finds that violent push-backs still happen at several EU external borders, such as between Croatia and Serbia as well as in Melilla. Even once on EU territory, people often face enormous difficulty to access asylum procedures because they have not received sufficient information, or because the authorities of EU Member States purposefully misdirect them.
In Croatia, people were told to sign forms in languages they could not understand. They thought they had applied for asylum, but instead they were pushed-back to Serbia. In Romania, people who arrived from the Black Sea described being immediately detained without being told how they could apply for asylum. People in Greece, Italy, and Malta told JRS how they were unable to navigate asylum and immigration procedure because they were not told how, or things were in a language they did not understand.
