In the visitors’ room of the Busmantsi immigration detention centre on the outskirts of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, Imad* sat at a table under the watchful eye of a guard. On the wall behind him, a poster drawn up on behalf of the European border agency, Frontex, asked: “Thinking of returning home?”
Imad was still a minor when he fled his hometown of Aleppo, leaving behind a city ravaged by years of fighting between rebels and government forces under Syria’s then president, Bashar al-Assad. He went first to Turkey in 2020, then entered Bulgaria in June 2023.
Imad received international protection and found a place to live in a shared apartment in Sofia.
A year later, however, Imad was arrested in his home at dawn and then stripped of his residence permit by Bulgaria’s intelligence service, the State Agency for National Security, SANS, which cited national security reasons. Banned from re-entering the EU, Imad appealed unsuccessfully and remains in detention pending deportation. He told BIRN he is regularly interrogated.
“They say I am a terrorist,” Imad said in July. “Why did you give me residence if I’m a terrorist?”
Deportation is not simple, however. Bulgaria, or the European Union, would need some kind of agreement with the new post-Assad government in Syria, but so far no such deal has been publicly announced.
So instead, Imad has been visited four times in the past year by officials from Frontex, who, his lawyer said, tried to convince him to return to Syria ‘voluntarily’. Bulgarian officials, almost certainly from the Migration Directorate of the interior ministry, regularly do the same, Imad told BIRN.
“They say that you must sign, and if you do not sign, we will forcibly deport you,” he said. But Imad says he has no home to return to, and has a younger brother in Bulgaria too. “I can’t leave him. What if they get my brother on terrorism as well?”
For a decade, as Assad clung to power, Syrians were almost guaranteed some form of international protection in Bulgaria. But in 2023, asylum claims hit record levels and attitudes hardened towards those trying to cross its borders irregularly, including Syrians, Afghans and others from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
A programme of Assisted Voluntary Return and Reintegration, AVRR, was expanded under the auspices of the interior ministry, and, in the wake of Assad’s ouster in December 2024, more than 200 Syrians were returned in the first six months of this year alone.
Authorities insist these returns are voluntary, even when they occur from detention. Each ‘volunteer’ receives 150 euros in cash at the airport before boarding a return flight.
Lawyers, rights groups and detainees describe a system in which prolonged detention and destitution leave Syrians with little genuine choice but to sign their own deportation papers.
Funded by the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, to the tune of millions of euros and supported by Frontex, the expanded AVRR programme marks a sharp shift in Bulgaria’s approach to the protection of Syrian refugees but faces growing questions about the tactics deployed.
“The main instrument [authorities] have is the psychological push for people to sign up to voluntary returns, and the main ‘technology’ they have for this psychological push is detention,” said Diana Radoslavova, a lawyer and founder of the Bulgarian legal aid NGO Centre for Legal Aid.
A Frontex spokesperson said its staff only conduct what they described as “counselling sessions” if the individual agrees. “Consent is key,” the spokesperson said. “As for anything that happens inside the centres, that’s something only the Bulgarian authorities can speak to.”
The Bulgarian interior ministry said the Migration Directorate is “obliged to inform all third-country nationals with imposed coercive administrative measures about the existing voluntary or forced return programmes”.
The European Commission did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.
Detention as tool of coercion
Voluntary return is defined by the United Nations refugee agency as the repatriation of a refugee to their country of origin “based on a free and informed choice”. Unlike forced deportations, there should be no coercion or force applied. In the event that authorities provide financial and logistical assistance to individuals who cooperate with their deportation, they are called assisted returns.
Over the summer of 2024, while Assad was still in power, the success rate of asylum applications from Syrian nationals in Bulgaria started to drop precipitously.
In justifying its decision, Bulgaria’s State Agency for Refugees, SAR, stated that the violence in the country “does not reach a level of indiscriminateness” that might warrant an offer of asylum.
SAR cited sources including country guidance from the EU Agency for Asylum and “brochures of the American NGO, the Carter Center”. The success rate of asylum applications submitted from Syrian nationals dropped almost immediately, from more than 90 per cent in the first nine months of 2024, to less than 18 per cent in the last three.
The Assad regime fell in December, and in the first three months of 2025, more than 1,000 Syrian nationals were turned down for asylum.
Many of those rejected are left living in Bulgaria without papers or any way to legally earn money.
In Sofia, BIRN reporters witnessed round-the-clock police patrols and ID checks in and around a neighbourhood informally dubbed ‘Arab Street’ because of the migrants and refugees who congregate there. Those found without papers risk ending up in the Busmantsi detention centre, which Radoslavova described as their “biggest fear”.
According to her, one of the only ways out of Bulgaria’s two immigration detention centres is to sign up to Bulgaria’s so-called voluntary return programme.
In December 2024, No Name Kitchen, NNK, a humanitarian organisation that supports migrants and refugees moving across Europe, reported that Bulgarian authorities were coercing Syrian asylum seekers to sign deportation documents to return to Syria.
The authorities are using detention as a tool, said Esme Smithson Swain, violence reporting coordinator at NNK.
“Detainees can be kept locked for up to 18 months if authorities make accusations that they are a threat to national security,” Smithson Swain told BIRN. “Authorities do this for a variety of reasons, including any kind of involvement in advocacy. Trying to advocate too hard to get yourself out of detention, for example, can get you listed as a threat to national security.”
“Even when there were court orders to release detainees, their detention continued because of challenges from the State Agency for National Security.”
Saudi human rights activist Abdulrahman al-Khalidi and Palestinian asylum seeker Nidal Saleh Wadi, for example, have been in detention for 47 and 16 months respectively, despite the courts ordering their release.
EU funding, Frontex ‘counselling’
Three-quarters of the funding of Bulgaria’s AVRR programme comes from the European Commission.
Frontex also provides so-called ‘return counselling’ for rejected asylum seekers, which can include information on the “obligation to leave the country and the consequences of not leaving,” and encouragement of “voluntary return”.
According to the Frontex spokesperson, in 2024 the agency sent two such counsellors to Bulgaria, where they conducted 976 so-called information sessions, such as the four Imad attended.
In just the first eight months of 2025, there were seven Frontex counsellors in the country, conducting 1,152 sessions. Between March and August this year, the spokesperson said, Frontex assisted in the ‘voluntary’ return of 69 Syrian nationals from Bulgaria.
Radoslavova said these sessions, coupled with an individual’s material circumstances in detention, amount to coercion.
“When people hear ‘You will stay here for 18 months’, they prefer to sign for voluntary return,” she said. “Maybe not on the first try, not on the second, but the consecutive sessions that they have every month when the conditions are really worsening… People just don’t endure. They sign.”
Rashid*, a Syrian asylum seeker who arrived in Bulgaria in August 2024 and was twice turned down for asylum, corroborated Radoslavova’s assessment.
Arrested on his way to work for not having the necessary papers, he was taken to the Busmantsi detention facility and told to either consent to voluntary return or spend 18 months in detention.
“There was no translator; they only spoke to me through Google Translate,” Rashid told BIRN. “When I asked them what I was signing, they didn’t give any information.”
He later discovered he had signed up to go back voluntarily to Syria. With his signature, Bulgaria’s Migration Directorate arranged a laissez-passer for him at the Syrian embassy in Sofia and booked him a one-way ticket to Damascus. When he spoke to BIRN, Rashid was already back in his family home in the countryside of Idlib, northwestern Syria.
“When they took me to the airport, I tried to resist,” he said. “Four officers in civilian clothing and one in uniform took me to a locked room inside the airport and beat me with batons.”
The Bulgarian interior ministry said it had no record of any such incident, telling BIRN: “So far, there has been no report of physical violence against a Syrian citizen who resisted implementation of the return policy”.
No oversight
Individuals in civilian clothing filmed escorting recent detainees at the Busmantsi migrant holding centre in Bulgaria into Sofia Airport. Video recorded on July 2, 2025. Source: BIRN.
BIRN obtained a video of a group of people being visibly escorted through Sofia airport in July 2025, filmed the same day as Imad said that two Syrians in Busmantsi detention centre were due to be returned to Syria having signed up for ‘voluntary’ return.
In the video, there are six men in civilian clothes who escort the group from a van marked ‘police’, all the way to the plane; one of the men holds what appear to be travel documents throughout the procedure.
Boycho Arnaudov, director of Bulgaria’s National Preventive Mechanism for Human Rights at the office of the Ombudsman, said that during ‘voluntary returns’ officers of the Migration Directorate of the interior ministry “support them [returnees] in transporting them from where they are at that moment… to the airport”.
At one point in the video, one of the men escorting the group shouts at the deportees, seemingly in an effort to make them understand what they should do.
Bulgaria’s Ombudsman has no legal authority to monitor ‘voluntary returns’, but Arnaudov told BIRN this was not a problem.
“The obligation of the Ombudsman is to only monitor compulsory administrative measures,” said. Compulsory measures mean “expulsion and forced removal”.
“We do not monitor voluntary returns, because they’re voluntary and the person is cooperating in the process of return,” Arnaudov told BIRN. “It is assumed that when it is a voluntary return, there would be no human rights violations.”
Dimitar Markov, director of the Law Programme at the Bulgarian think-tank Centre for the Study of Democracy, said the interior ministry also has no obligation to inform monitoring bodies about ‘voluntary’ deportations.
“In case of voluntary return, authorities are not supposed to be there,” said Markov. “And if they are there, I wouldn’t expect the Ministry of Interior to inform the Ombudsman […] that they are going to escort a voluntary return. That’s not going to happen because they don’t have to.”
If the authorities declare a deportation ‘voluntary’, this effectively means that it does not require monitoring by the Ombudsman, which would otherwise be mandatory under EU law. Monitors have broad jurisdiction to check the legality of a deportation procedure, including the existence of a valid deportation order and whether there is any pending asylum application or appeal; they can escort a deportee all the way to the country of origin, and halt the entire procedure if there are medical grounds to do so.
When asked if the Migration Directorate was bypassing the Ombudsman’s monitoring mechanism by declaring its deportations ‘voluntary’, the Bulgarian interior ministry responded: “According to the law, the Migration Directorate informs the Ombudsman of each case of return through escort (repatriation)”.
‘Dictated at the European level’
Besides ‘voluntary’ returns, Bulgaria told Eurostat that it had also conducted 50 ‘assisted forced returns’ of Syrian nationals between January and June, a figure that accounts for more than 40 per cent of all deportations from Europe to Syria in that period.
In August 2025, the European Court of Human Rights halted the planned forced deportation of a Syrian national from Austria, questioning the authorities’ assessment of the security situation in Syria. The deportation ultimately went through with the Court’s blessing, after it decided that a risk to the deportee’s life could not be shown.
Inadequate assessment of the threats to the life and freedom of deportees may represent a violation of Articles 2 and 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Markov said he was at a loss to explain the legal basis for forced returns from Bulgaria to Syria.
“Syria is not included in the list of safe countries adopted by the government in 2024, and as far as I am aware, this list has not been amended since,” he said. “To be honest, I find it difficult to explain these figures.”
When asked about these forced returns, which his office is required to monitor, Arnaudov, from the Ombudsman’s office, declined to comment. The interior ministry also did not comment specifically on forced returns, referring BIRN to a previous answer that read: “At this time, the Directorate of Migration is using the Frontex Agency’s reintegration programme”, by which, it said, 210 third-country nationals had been “assisted”, including 128 Syrians.
Meanwhile, Bulgarian authorities are continuing to expand their deportation programme.
In October 2024, after Italy, Austria, Cyprus, Czechia, Greece, Croatia, Slovakia and Slovenia, called on the EU to declare parts of Syria safe for deportations, the European Commission announced a 25-million-euro fund for “new models for incentivising assisted voluntary returns”.
Up to 30 per cent of the allocated money from this fund can be used for “services related to forced returns, like small cash assistance for people who are in the forced return procedure but who decide to cooperate”.
From this fund, the Commission allocated an additional 3.3 million euros to Bulgaria’s AVRR programme.
With this new grant, Bulgarian authorities plan to hire 15 new ‘return counsellors’ within the Migration Directorate, as well as pay the monthly salaries of 20 existing staff. The aim is to deport at least 900 refugees and asylum seekers from open camps, and 400 or more from detention centres.
Radoslavova said there was a clear link between such targets and Bulgaria’s accession to Europe’s borderless Schengen zone, at first partially in March 2024 and in full as of January 1 this year.
“Unfortunately, this is not just a national political agenda,” the lawyer told BIRN. “It is dictated at the European level. To join Schengen, Bulgaria had to reduce [migration] numbers. Now it must keep them low.”