Croatia has seen a sharp rise in illegal migrants since it joined Europe’s borderless Schengen area this year, police said on Thursday, as Slovenia stepped up patrols near their common border.
The Balkan country became part of Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone, the world’s largest such area on January 1. More than 400 million people are entitled to move freely between its 27 member countries, most of whom are also members of the European Union.
Croatia has the EU’s longest external land border, 1,350 kilometres (840 miles) in total, and applies strict checks on arrivals crossing from its non-EU neighbours in the Balkans — Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia.
This year more than 54,500 people illegally crossed into Croatia — 140 percent more than in the same period last year –, according to border police chief Zoran Niceno.
This showed that the number of people without documents who were using the so-called Balkans route to reach the EU was again on the rise, Niceno told national HR radio.
Hundreds of thousands of people attempted to reach the bloc by land via the perilous western Balkans route in 2015 and 2016, fleeing war and poverty in Africa, Central Asia and the Middle East.
The route was more or less shut down in March 2016 but smaller numbers of would-be migrants have continued to use it on their journey towards Europe.
Croatia’s northern neighbour Slovenia, also a member of the EU and the Schengen zone, has meanwhile stepped up police controls along the “most critical parts of the border” with Croatia, Interior Minister Bostjan Poklukar said on Wednesday.
“These are not internal (border) checks,” he stressed.
The number of migrants entering Slovenia almost tripled in the first eight months of they year compared to 2022, the authorities said.
Rights groups and the media have repeatedly accused Croatian police of illegally forcing would-be migrants back over the EU’s external borders, notably to Bosnia, often using violence.
NGOs say children are among the people being forced back over the border, and Croatia is also failing to provide accommodation for asylum seekers in the country while their requests for refugee status are processed.
There were more than 1,700 cases of illegal expulsions this year, according to Croatian human rights group the Centre for Peace Studies.
More than half the migrants questioned have reported “physical violence, humiliation or theft” while they were being expelled, the group told AFP.
