Documents obtained by BIRN show that EU Frontex officers deployed to Bulgaria’s border with Turkey are being intimidated into silence in the face of pushbacks and brutality against migrants and refugees, prompting warnings that the agency’s credibility is on the line.
The woman was “begging” and “crying for mercy”, but the Frontex officers weren’t in charge. “Don’t make me angry,” the Bulgarian border guard responded. Returning from the woods with her four fellow migrants, the guard forced them all to crawl through a hole in the fence, back into Turkey.
That’s the account of two officers of the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, who accompanied the Bulgarian border guard on a regular night patrol on Bulgaria’s southeastern frontier with Turkey.
“In the [patrol] car,” the officers reported, “the Bulgarian officer confessed he felt sorry for the woman, but he had orders from his superior to push back all the ‘Talibans’,” a term used by Bulgarian border guards for migrants and refugees trying to cross from Turkey.
They said their Bulgarian colleague “instructed” them not to file a report to Frontex on what was an obvious ‘pushback’, the forced and illegal return of migrants and refugees before they even have a chance to stake their case for asylum.
The Frontex officers ignored him and the Bulgarians suspected as much; the officers spoke of feeling “hunted” and voiced “fears about their safety”. Frontex eventually pulled them out, “for their own protection”.
The incident, which occurred in December last year, is detailed in one of eight Serious Incident Reports – used by Frontex for recording and investigating allegations of rights violations in its operations – obtained by BIRN alongside other internal documents concerning rights violations on the Bulgarian-Turkey border under the agency’s watch.
Taken together, these documents paint a picture of a Frontex deployment under intense pressure from Bulgaria’s border police to turn a blind eye to recurrent pushbacks and abuse of migrants and refugees.
But while the officers in the case of the woman resisted that pressure, others have not.
A week after the woman was forced to crawl through the border, Jonas Grimheden, the head of Frontex’s internal rights watchdog, the Fundamental Rights Office, FRO, wrote to Anton Zlatanov, Bulgaria’s border police chief, saying that on multiple occasions Frontex border guards had “directly witnessed violations committed by Bulgarian officers” against migrants and refugees trying to enter the EU.
The FRO, he said, had collected “numerous credible accounts related to pressure used by Bulgarian border guards against Frontex deployed officers not to report their observations”.
BIRN’s findings raise fresh questions for Hans Leijtens, who took over as Frontex executive director in March last year with a vow that the agency would never again turn a blind eye to rights violations on the EU’s borders. Leijtens replaced Fabrice Leggeri, who resigned the previous year over the findings of an investigation by EU anti-fraud agency OLAF that implicated Frontex in pushbacks.
Yet Frontex officers are still complaining of pressure from Bulgarian border officers to keep quiet or face retaliation and “harassment”, all while senior EU officials in public champion Bulgaria’s efforts to protect the boundaries of the bloc.
According to one FRO document seen by BIRN, officers “often felt helpless and inadequate to react, citing also language barriers, short decision-making times and feeling vulnerable vis-a-vis the Bulgarian officers”.
During a January meeting of the Frontex Management Board, a senior official of the European Commission, Henrik Nielsen, who sits on the board, warned of yet more damage to the agency’s reputation, according to minutes of the meeting obtained by BIRN via a Freedom of Information request.
Expressing concern at attempts to “circumvent or hinder reporting obligations and SIRs”, Nielsen stressed that “a credible reporting mechanism is at the core of the credibility of the Agency itself, and at the core of the argument that more Frontex presence can improve the situation on the ground”.
That presence was tripled earlier this year.
‘He looked me in the eyes and fired’
Yahia Homsi says he will never forget June 13, 2024. It was a Thursday, and Homsi, a Syrian, was at work as an outreach officer in Bulgaria’s biggest refugee reception centre, training in the gym with minors who had crossed the border into the European Union country without family. A Syrian boy walked in.
“I want to file a claim against the police,” Homsi recalled him saying. “They shot at me and I won’t stay silent.”
The boy showed Homsi a wound on his right thigh and medical records from the hospital in the coastal city of Burgas.
The records, obtained by BIRN, state: “Gunshot wound to the right hip joint from an attempted illegal border crossing.” The wound was caused by a rubber bullet.
Homsi took the boy to Mission Wings, the NGO he works for and which reported the case to the Bulgarian interior ministry and State Agency for Refugees, as well as to Frontex.
In an interview with BIRN in early July, the boy, who was 15 and originally from the war-scarred city of Deir ez-zor in eastern Syria, recounted his ordeal.
Travelling with a group of around 20 migrants and refugees, he had spent days wandering around the forests of Turkey, trying to find the right moment and location to cross the border. He said he had already been pushed back nine times. It was May and a light rain was falling. The group crossed, and was quickly confronted by masked men with guns. The group scattered.
“The police started shooting everywhere,” the boy told BIRN. “Not in the air, but at our feet.”
Chased by one of them, the boy stumbled and fell to the ground.
“He was trying to scare me by pointing a gun at my body,” the boy recalled. “He shot once, intentionally, in my leg, and twice close to my legs.”
“He looked me in the eyes and fired. I couldn’t see his face because he was wearing a black mask. I only saw his eyes.”
According to the boy’s account, the border guards spent more than an hour discussing what to do with him as he writhed in pain on the ground. Eventually, he was taken to hospital in the coastal city of Burgas. There, after surgery, he said he was questioned by police, who asked whether he had attacked the officer before the officer shot him. The boy said he didn’t.
He was sent to a detention centre in Lyubimets, south-central Bulgaria, and moved two weeks later to the open reception centre, Bulgaria’s largest, in nearby Harmanli, where he asked for help from Homsi.
Less than a week after the interview, the boy disappeared, Mission Wings told BIRN. They said he had continued his journey to western Europe.
In a written response to BIRN, the Bulgarian border police confirmed an incident on May 10 involving 19 “illegal migrants” and four army Special Forces officers, which support border police operations on the Bulgarian-Turkish frontier.
According to the response, the officers first fired shots into the air but the group continued to run. One of the migrants, it said, tried to hit one of the officers with a rock.
“Acting in self-defence, the serviceman shot him with a rubber bullet in the area of the right leg.”
It said a report on the incident was sent to the military police and the joint special operations command.
Mission Wings director Diana Dimova disputed the authorities’ account, saying the case involved “very serious crimes”.
“We have a concrete case with enough evidence – the case of an unaccompanied child,” Dimova told BIRN. “And someone is trying to cover up this crime.”
Mission Wings handed over the evidence gathered to the Serious Incidents Team at Grimheden’s FRO.
“We are aware of this case and are looking into it,” Grimheden told BIRN. “Since our investigation is ongoing, I do not want to go into any details.”
Were it not for Dimova’s persistence, however, the case of the boy’s shooting, like so many other incidents of alleged brutality on Bulgaria’s 259-kilometre border with Turkey, would have likely passed without notice.
Warm words, ever deeper cooperation
Frontex stepped up its presence in Bulgaria under Joint Operation Terra, which was launched in early 2022. Its officers take part in joint patrols with Bulgarian border guards in all-terrain jeeps and vans equipped with thermal-vision technology paid for with EU money.
Leijtens inspected the operations in late February. Standing next to a fence topped with razor wire near the Kapitan Andreevo border crossing, the busiest land border crossing point in Europe, the Dutchman expressed support for Bulgaria’s long-awaited accession to Europe’s passport-free Schengen zone.
“Bulgaria is a very important partner,” he was quoted as saying by Reuters. “Without Bulgaria we cannot protect our external borders.”
He also issued a warning. “We are guarding not only the borders, but also EU values,” Leijtens said.
In a confidential memo prepared just days before the visit to the Bulgarian border, Grimheden briefed Leijtens on the accounts of Frontex officers who said they had been instructed by Bulgarian border police not to report details of systematic pushbacks.
Serious or persistent rights violations would normally require Frontex to suspend operations, yet during his trip to the border Leijtens announced the opposite – a tripling of the Frontex presence to 500 officers.
A few days later, European Commission President Ursula von Der Leyen announced a new strategic partnership between the Commission, EU agencies and Bulgaria “to strengthen the EU’s external borders”, covering areas such as border management, asylum procedures, returns and police cooperation.
The agreement builds on a multi-million-euro pilot project launched in March 2023 that brought EU support for faster asylum procedures and returns as well as additional resources and equipment for border management.
Von Der Leyen’s February announcement followed a BIRN investigation earlier that month that found Frontex and the Commission had effectively ignored internal reports of violent pushbacks in the process of bringing Bulgaria – partially, for the time being – into the Schengen zone.
Bulgaria claims ‘zero tolerance’ for human rights violationsOn social media, Frontex has called the Kapitan Andreevo border crossing a “Mecca” for border guards and the “end of the road for all sorts of criminals”.
The crossing is a key hub for Frontex personnel deployed along Bulgaria’s border with Turkey; visiting in April, Frontex’s second-in-command, Lars Gerdes, lauded the “excellent cooperation” of Bulgarian border police.
The border, however, is also where human rights organisations and Frontex’s own monitoring body have documented crimes stretching back years. These include migrants and refugees being beaten, stripped, chased and bitten by police dogs and pushed back en masse to Turkey, all committed by Bulgarian officers taking part in Frontex operations.
According to data compiled by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, 9,897 alleged pushbacks took place along Bulgaria’s borders with Turkey and Greece in 2023 involving 174,588 persons.
Bulgarian authorities have always strenuously denied such allegations.
“We have zero tolerance for people who disrespect human rights,” Zlatanov, the border police chief, told the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee in April.
When pressed, Bulgarian officials regularly point to the fact there is no record of such instances in official databases.
Yet for more than a year now, Grimheden has alerted Frontex top brass to Bulgarian authorities’ “tacit practice of non-reporting of actions severely endangering the fundamental rights of migrants”.
‘Attempts to cover up their actions’
The attempts to silence Frontex border guards are detailed in eight Serious Incident Reports, or SIRs.
Examining 16 border interventions, the FRO found that on multiple occasions Frontex officers were pressured by their Bulgarian counterparts “to avoid reporting not only of fundamental rights violations observed but also their apprehensions/encounters with migrants”.
“All these Frontex officers understood that this request was linked to [the] Bulgarian officers’ attempt to cover up their actions and likely the migrants’ subsequent collective expulsion,” it concluded.
The SIRs, based on testimony taken from six officers on three different Frontex teams, describe in sometimes graphic detail multiple incidents of pushbacks and abuse between September and December last year, witnessed by Frontex officers while on joint patrols with Bulgarian border guards. They include beatings, migrants “groaning” in pain and being threatened with ‘flashlight tasers’ – a powerful torch and stun gun combined – and a Bulgarian officer using an unloaded gun to motion to migrants where they should go.
One report describes an incident in September 2023 when Frontex officers witnessed a group of some 25 people “kneeling in the presence of two Bulgarian officers” near the border fence that separates Bulgaria from Turkey. Five of them were made to undress, “with their belongings confiscated and being burned”.
At the end of the shift, “the Frontex team was approached by a Bulgarian team leader who started asking some probing questions and indicated that it would be better not to report anything”, the report states.
Under the rules of a Frontex deployment, its officers act under the command of the local border force, in this case the Bulgarian. The Frontex officers initially complied and only notified the FRO five weeks later when their deployment ended, despite an obligation to report any suspected rights violations immediately.
When FRO investigators visited the scene two months after the alleged incident, they found a sign for Sofia pointing towards Turkey.
Sending migrants ‘to Sofia’ is a euphemism for pushing them back over the border, the Frontex officers told the FRO. The FRO concluded that all 25 individuals were “likely” subjected to “collective expulsion”.
In its assessment of the incident in December, in which the woman was forced to crawl back through a hole in the border fence, the FRO faulted the officers for not intervening and cited operational rules that all Frontex officers are “obligated to act or refuse a command” that may threaten human rights.
However, the FRO added, “for such cases, they are not sufficiently prepared by the Agency”.
Warning that Frontex risks being implicated in “illegal practices”, the FRO called for “a clear instruction from Frontex hierarchy to intervene when observing fundamental rights violations”.
Asked to respond, a Frontex spokesperson told BIRN: “Frontex is enhancing its instructions and protocols to ensure that our officers are not just observers but are empowered to act when confronted with situations that require intervention to protect fundamental rights.”
The Bulgarian border police said it had followed up on all SIRs it had received from Frontex and reported back to the agency.
“No Bulgarian border police officers have been sanctioned in connection with the issued reports as there has been no proven excess of authority,” the border police directorate told BIRN.
“We strive to minimise incidents at the border,” it added. “Training was conducted for the senior, middle and executive staff on the ground, which had results – since January 1, 2024, there have been no serious incidents related to human rights violations by the Bulgarian border police.”
Frontex internal complaints mechanism ‘ineffective’
In March this year, Grimheden submitted a report to the Frontex Management Board saying that the FRO “regularly receives reports of feared repercussions of Frontex officers who are planning to report serious incidents”.
Three months later, BIRN revealed that Frontex officers deployed in Albania had “implicit instructions not to issue SIRs”.
EU officials have repeatedly justified Frontex’s expanding footprint at Europe’s borders by arguing that its officers help guarantee that fundamental rights are respected and cases of wrongdoing are duly reported.
Yet, in the case of Bulgaria, the FRO concluded that “the presence or involvement of Frontex officers in an event is not necessarily a guarantee for fundamental rights compliance”, a phrasing used in multiple SIRs.
In none of the investigated incidents between September and December 2023 did Frontex officers “intervene in the moments when confronted with wrongdoing”.
When Frontex was implicated in the pushbacks in the Aegean in 2020, the revelations eventually triggered the downfall of Leijtens’s predecessor, Leggeri.
In 2024, critics say little appears to have changed.
In recent months, there has been intense discussion in the senior ranks of Frontex to address the flawed SIR mechanism. In late August, both Leijtens and Grimheden travelled to Sofia to meet senior Bulgarian officials, including Zlatanov, the border police chief, and now former Interior Minister Kalin Stoyanov. BIRN understands that the talks, in part, looked at how to address human rights abuses in Frontex operations and limit further damage to the agency’s reputation.
“It is very important that Frontex’s internal compliance system is functional to ensure that the Agency is not complicit in human rights violations,” said Dr. Lisa-Marie Komp, an Amsterdam-based lawyer representing a Syrian family who took Frontex to the European Court of Justice arguing the agency should be held accountable for their pushback from Greece to Turkey in 2016. The court dismissed the case in September 2023 but the family has appealed.
“Reporting incidents is an essential first step in this process,” Komp told BIRN. “The Agency’s internal complaints mechanism has been ineffective and very slow and significant hurdles must be passed when lodging a claim against the Agency at the European Court of Justice.”