The project
What do the confinement camps built or financed by EU countries in recent years to segregate asylum seekers and/or migrants in transit look like, and how have they disrupted the territories in which they have been set up? Thanks to the book “Chiusi dentro” (Locked in) edited by RiVolti ai Balcani network and published by Altreconomia in 2024, comes the digital project “Locked in. From above”, which with exclusive satellite images taken by PlaceMarks shows the face of European policies: to block, to reject, to confine, to condemn to marginalisation.
From Turkey to Greece, from Serbia to Italy, from Albania to Bosnia and Herzegovina, via Lithuania, North Macedonia, Hungary and more. Fifteen countries, more than 100 images and maps to get to know the camps of today’s Europe.
It is a project of the network RiVolti ai Balcani, realised by Altreconomia in collaboration with PlaceMarks.
Published on 16 September 2024 – Last updated: 16 September 2024
This project is a kind of spin-off of the book ‘Chiusi dentro’, to which we refer for an understanding of the phenomenon in its entirety and complexity. “Locked in. From above” does not pretend to show all the detention camps, detention and therefore confinement of migrants in Europe or in its immediate vicinity -in itself impossible- but it does want to materially recount some emblematic, and disturbing, cases. For their evolution (or involution) over time, with very effective before-after effects, also underlining the characteristics of the structures we have seen arise, their geographical location, their frequent carceral nature, their being built in remote areas or within the heart of the urban context. With numerous additions compared to the cases examined in the book, given the strength of the satellite image and the historical story told.
“There is a mantra that runs through the European Union, an unwavering agreement that unites, without exception, the states that compose it. Divided on (almost) everything, they are united on one point: to limit the entry of migrants into the territory of the Union as much as possible, to close and protect the borders” – Livio Pepino, from the preface of “Chiusi dentro”
The country cases
• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
The choice of countries follows and complements that made in the book “Chiusi dentro”. There are real “countries of confinement” outside the EU (such as Turkey), EU member states as well as countries that are not part of the EU but are in the heart of Europe. The Balkan land routes are retraced but the Mediterranean and Aegean are also looked at. A way to account for the spread of this strategy that has seen the return of the camp model.
“The purpose of today’s confinement camps is to confine large masses of human beings who have been degraded to ‘non-persons’ to be taken care of for the sole purpose of preventing them, at least in part, from reaching the territory of those states that do not intend, either legally or materially, to take them on. To the extent that the confinement camp has as its primary purpose the authoritarian management of human masses considered in excess, it can therefore, with its peculiarities, be considered a concentrationary institution” – Gianfranco Schiavone from “Chiusi dentro”
Turkey
“The intricate reality of confinement camps in Turkey reveals a complex landscape in which humanitarian issues, legal problems and geopolitical dynamics intersect. The lives confined within these spaces mirror the challenges faced by the macrocosm of displaced populations around the world”. Who speaks is human rights expert Mahmut Kacan in his chapter of the book “Chiusi dentro” focused on Turkey, a real case of a country of confinement.
The following images recount the effects of the war in neighbouring Syria that erupted in March 2011 (and also the disastrous earthquake of 6 February 2023) and the fallout of the European Council’s decision to pay the Turkish government to keep millions of Syrian refugees on its territory. As reconstructed by Caterina Bove and Matteo Astuti in “Chiusi dentro”, the declaration, known as the agreement between the European Union and Turkey, dates back to March 2016, through which Turkey, in exchange for a consideration of six billion euros, a commitment to liberalise visa policy for Turkish citizens and an acceleration of the EU accession process and promises to resettle Syrian citizens on EU territory in exchange for the readmission from Greece of “other” Syrian citizens, declared its willingness to engage in maritime patrols to prevent departures to Europe, and in the repatriation of those who irregularly reach Turkey’s Aegean islands, and to provide apparent reception and protection measures for Syrian nationals staying there.
“The Court of Justice of the European Union, called upon to pronounce on the legitimacy of this declaration and attached allocation of funds for the purposes announced and on their compatibility with respect for fundamental rights -Bove and Astuti continue- could/should not pronounce: formally, the announcement (albeit concrete and materialised) is not an international agreement, nor is it a commitment made by and towards a European institution but by and towards the individual states that make it up”.
The Syrian refugee relocation programme from Turkey to the EU has been a failure and has mainly resulted in the marginalisation of millions of people. Suffice it to say that as of March 2024, there are more than three million Syrian refugees in Turkey, while resettlement since 2016 is less than 70,000. “This was a planned failure -writes Gianfranco Schiavone in ‘Chiusi dentro’- as the resettlement programme was destined to wear out in the short term until it ceased altogether and was forgotten. The announced exchange programme that would have reduced the Syrian refugees to nothing more than prisoners, already highly censurable in its modalities, was in fact a cover-up programme for its real purpose: to confine the refugees to Turkey without any other solution. In fact, the system of confinement camps does not provide for the activation of programmes and interventions aimed at evolving the condition of those confined through transfers to countries able to offer them effective protection, nor does it provide for organised programmes to issue entry visas for humanitarian reasons in application of the European Code on Visas”.
The most recent dynamics in Turkey point to a security-focused management of migration, with priority given to “voluntary return”, expulsion, refoulement also by sea and “closed” border management. Anti-migrant sentiment is said to be on the rise, especially during elections. The registration of people is made more and more complicated and the proportion of those who find themselves undocumented is growing, condemned to limbo with respect to access to rights also due to the lack of transparency in the implementation of regulations and procedures.
We begin this journey with the Temporary accommodation centre in Adana (below), which is located more than ten kilometres from the provincial capital of the same name, and can only be reached by secondary (presumably unpaved) roads. Set up as an emergency tent city in 2012, it became a full-fledged camp with tents and containers for Syrian refugees in 2016. This shot dates back to 2018. Partial dismantling began in 2020 but the camp is still active and as of March 2024 housed almost 13,000 people (data from the International Organisation for Migration, IOM).
Another camp for Syrian refugees in Turkey -there were nine distributed over five provinces at the end of 2023- is Osmaniye (over 10,000 Syrian nationals present as of March 2024 according to the IOM). Unlike Adana, it is close to industrial sites and a resettlement area. An emergency tent city since 2012, like the other camp, it has housed tents and containers (similar to Adana) with prefabricated structures, including multi-storey ones, since 2016. The satellite image below is from 2020 and shows the partial evacuation started that year. Double fenced, with insulated structures, the camp is active.
The case of the Islahiye camp is also significant. It too was set up in 2012, a few months after the beginning of the war in Syria, as a temporary tent city. One could see then the very high density, the double fence, the scarcity of space and free services. Looking at its evolution over time, it can be said that it has never been expanded or improved. It was dismantled in 2019 and is now replaced by a residential neighbourhood of condominiums.
The Islahiye camp
Click on the cursor in the centre of the image, hold it down and scroll left or right to observe the evolution over time
“Turkey, in line with a declared open-door policy, has accepted large numbers of refugees, thus becoming a major centre of migratory movements. The Turkish government, largely unprepared, has set up several tent camps along the southern border, far away from the cities” – Mahmut Kacan from “Chiusi dentro”
The size of the refugee camps in Nizip, Elbeyli and Kilis is also impressive. The first, gigantic, has been set up since 2012 near a dam for hydroelectric production, in the province of Gaziantep, where 430,000 Syrian refugees are registered in mid-2024 out of 2.5 million residents (16.5%)
An initial dismantling of Nizip began in 2020, as can be seen in the comparison below, which covers a specific area of the camp between 2017 and 2022.
The camp of Nizip
The province of Kilis in mid-2024 has just over 225,000 residents, of whom more than 70,000 are Syrian refugees, almost a third of the residents. The camp below is close to the border crossing with Syria. The following pictures show the situation before the crisis (2011) and then afterwards, in 2016, with the militarisation of the border line and the establishment of the two camps (one Turkish, top, and one Syrian, bottom). The camp in Turkey is organised with containers, walls and fencing, turrets and various common areas. Today it is partly dismantled.
The Kilis camp
Looking at the Syrian territory, we can observe huge informal camps that have been set up since 2013 and are still present today.
The situation in Syrian territory
The camp in the Elbeyli district, still in the province of Kilis, lies on the border line with Syria. It is located in an isolated area, with rows of containers and communal spaces. It has a boundary wall, towers and a metal fence. This shot is from 2016 and the facility is in partial dismantling.
Further reading:
• Mahmut Kacan’s chapter on Turkey in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• Caterina Bove and Matteo Astuti’s chapter on the externalisation of the right to asylum in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• The latest report on Turkey in the Asylum information database (Aida)
Go to the other countries:
• Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
Cyprus
Cyprus is the EU country with the highest rate of repatriation of new asylum seekers in 2023. There has been a significant increase in violence against migrants for a while, with incidents that for the Cyprus Refugee Council “have included pogrom-like demonstrations and violent attacks against migrants and refugees”. The main incidents occurred in Chloraka and then in Limassol, where mobs destroyed shops owned by migrants and attacked several people. “Experts blamed the increasing spread of xenophobia in Cypriot politics and media, fuelled by the diffusion of disinformation and the poor management of the large number of people trying to reach Europe”.
The words of Bill Frelick, director of Human Rights Watch’s Refugee and Migrant Division, pronounced last September are useful to understand the atmosphere around migrants and asylum seekers: “In mid-September 2023, Cypriot Interior Minister Constantinos Ioannou complained that EU member states cannot repatriate asylum seekers to Syria and said that the EU should re-evaluate whether Syria is safe for return, so that asylum seekers can be deported or repatriated”.
An unwise statement that nevertheless tells the political orientation of the Cypriot executive. Measures have been taken in the country in recent years to “speed up” (i.e. make the processing of asylum applications more expeditious), to reduce financial support for asylum seekers and to begin the construction of a detention centre for migrants in order to, as Ioannou himself put it, “make Cyprus an unattractive destination”. From 2019, the European agency Frontex support Cyprus in the “management” of its borders and migratory flows.
Here we show a satellite image from 2023 of the First Registration Centre at Pournara in Kokkinotrimithia, west of Nicosia.
“The reception centre […] was originally set up in 2014 as a tented facility with a capacity of 350 people thanks to EU funding to deal with the increase in arrivals from Syria and was only intended to provide 72-hour emergency accommodation for newly arrived asylum seekers -the Cyprus Refugee Council recalls-. As of 2020, asylum seekers who arrived in the country irregularly are sent to Pournara. The services provided by the centre include identification, registration and submission of asylum applications, as well as medical examinations and vulnerability assessments. The length of stay in 2023 was approximately 30-40 days for adults, while for refugees it is longer, on average three months. While staying in the centre, asylum seekers are not allowed to leave”.
Further reading:
• The latest report on Cyprus in the Asylum information database (Aida)
• The report “I Can’t Go Home, Stay Here, or Leave” by Human Rights Watch
Go to the other countries:
• Turkey • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
Greece
In the strategy of confinement of people on the move adopted by the EU and member state governments in recent years, Greece is an exemplary case of the emergence of the camp as the sole form of “reception” for asylum seekers, “irregular migrants” and also for those who obtain international protection in a context of deprivation of fundamental rights.
Since the entry into force of the alleged agreement between the EU and Turkey in March 2016, Greece has increasingly become a true laboratory where new ways of managing migratory flows have been experimented, from the hotspot approach to the “pretence of non-entry”, passing through refoulement -even of asylum seekers and refugees- to outright detention, transforming itself over the years from a transit country to a space of confinement and “cover up” of people.
Above: the camp of Moria, on the Greek island of Lesvos, before and after the terrible fire in September 2020
The perception of a distorted reality inspired these policies. According to data provided by the European agency Frontex, since the supposed refugee crisis of 2015, when the eastern route had seen 885,386 official crossings, the number of people arriving in Europe from Turkey has stabilised well below 100,000 arrivals: 42,319 in 2017, 56,561 in 2018, 83,333 in 2019, 19,681 in 2020, 20,567 in 2021, 43,906 in 2022. During 2023, the International Organisation for Migration recorded 47,930 migrants arriving in Greece, of which 6,369 by land and 41,561 by sea. Among the landings, the top five nationalities were Syrian (31.25%), Afghan (20.01%), Palestinian (16.29%), Somali (6.47%) and Eritrean (4.24%). Women represent 22% of the total, minors 35%. Most new arrivals (38%) were registered on the Dodecanese islands, followed by Lesvos (32%), Samos (19%), Chios (6%) and then the others (5%).
Islands have become traps for migrants, as explained by Martina Tazzioli, Associate Professor in Geography at the University of Bologna, author of “Border Abolitionism. Migration containment and the genealogies of struggles and rescue” (2023), “The Making of Migration. The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders” (2019) and “Spaces of Governmentality. Autonomy of migration and the Arab Uprisings” (2015) and a keen-careful observer of the dynamics of the Greek camps.
However, a radical transformation has taken place on the mainland. “As of September/October 2022, people wishing to apply for asylum are directed to two camps: Malakasa, relatively close to Athens, and Diavata in the north, near Thessaloniki – Tazzioli comments in the book ‘Chiusi dentro’-. It is no longer possible to ask for protection in any other way and it is not a quick procedure: people are trapped in these two camps for at least 25 days, the time limit set by the Greek authorities to complete all the registration procedures (in reality, it happens that they stay even longer due to delays caused by the lack of personnel) and during this time they have no right to leave the camp”.
Below it is visible the creation of the Malakasa camp on the Greek mainland, 25 kilometres from Athens, along the motorway. Like the one in Diavata, Malakasa has also become a hotspot where everything happens: from registration by the police to collecting the application to become asylum seekers.
The Malakasa camp
The transformation of the camps on the mainland has also led to a partial change of those on the islands, which have been transformed into Close Control Access Centres of Islands (Ccaci), namely new facilities that provide for a more controlled access of people in and out.
The ‘hotspot approach’ was introduced in 2015 by the European Commission with the adoption of the European Agenda on Migration in order to “assist” Italy and Greece to fulfil their obligations under EU law: to quickly identify, register and fingerprint incoming migrants, channel applicants through asylum procedures, implement the relocation programme and conduct return operations. For this purpose, five hotspots were established in Greece under the legal form of First Reception Centres in Lesvos, Chios, Samos, Leros and Kos, which were transformed into Closed controlled access centres of islands as of 2021. The hotspot facilities were supposed to have 7,450 places but their capacity increased to 13,338 at the end of 2020 and with the construction of the Ccaci reached 15,934.
On Samos, Leros, Lesvos and Chios, the new closed facilities were moved to different areas than the previous centres and were located in remote locations, isolated from urban areas and with poor connections to the main towns of each island.
The Samos camp
Click on the cursor in the centre of the image, hold it down and scroll left or right to observe the evolution over time
Above is the centre of Samos, located seven kilometres from the town of Vathy. It is situated in an isolated area about four kilometres from the nearest population centres. The facility is a prison and since 2020 there has been a significant expansion with large two-storey buildings or tensile structures. The camp is organised into compartments separated by fences and walls in at least ten zones.
The Leros camp
Above the one in Leros, six kilometres from the town of Agia Marina, and those in Kos (immediately below) and Chios (further down) 15 and 11 kilometres respectively from the towns of the same name.
The Kos camp
The Chios camp
This is also the case for the new centre in Lesvos built in an area 30 kilometres from the city of Mytilene. The entire flat space over the years has been occupied.
The Mytilene camp
According to testimonies collected by the Greek council for refugees, living conditions inside the Ccaci on the islands are similar to those of a prison, with de facto illegal detention practices and arbitrary restrictions on personal freedom and freedom of movement. The environment itself resembles a prison: sites are cordoned off with fences around the perimeter and around each housing section; private security and police conduct 24-hour surveillance.
In September 2023, twenty-two organisations, half of which are active on the islands, denounced “the illegal detention of more than 4,000 asylum seekers on Samos and Lesvos”.
The camps in Greece also play a role in relation to refoulement practices. The Greek Council for Refugees in its report “At Europe’s borders: between impunity and criminalisation” of March 2023 argues that refoulement operations are “an unofficial migration and border policy implemented by the Greek state authorities and their auxiliaries”, demonstrating that “such illegal practices constitute a systematic, meticulously planned and comprehensive policy involving multiple actors and operational steps”.
It is impressive to observe the situation on the mainland. In Fylakio, in the Evros Region, in an isolated rural area, a real prison facility has been built, with double fences and internally divided into compartments, one probably administrative and two detention ones. The centre has been mentioned several times in recent years by independent research as a place of very serious violation of the rights of people in transit from Turkey.
The Fylakio camp
Below it is visible the construction of the camp in Kleidi, a village in the municipality of Amyntaio, in the Florina regional unit of western Macedonia, south of Promachonas. It is very isolated, about ten kilometres from the nearest settlement. It is located at the bottom of a narrow valley, with the possible risk of flooding. Almost all the building spaces have been occupied, one can also see the double metal fence.
The Kleidi camp
Then there is the case of Nea Kavala, in Polykastro. The following pictures show very clearly the transition from an emergency response (with tents and containers on the airport runway) to a structured camp “solution” with fencing and container type lined up.
The Polykastro camp
Below the agricultural area on the outskirts of Serres, in the Greek Region of Central Macedonia, in 2016 and again in 2023.
The Serres camp
Then there is the case of Corinth, with a field built in the stadium of a military facility. An example of adaptation of existing urban spaces. A few containers placed on the perimeter are added to the common tent structure. It was realised between 2019 and 2020.
The Corinth camp
Further reading:
• Manuela Valsecchi’s chapter in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• Anna Brambilla and Caterina Bove’s chapter on readmissions, disguised forms of refoulement in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• The latest report on Greece on the Asylum information database (Aida)
Go to the other countries:
• Turkey • Cyprus • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
Bulgaria
“The worst thing of all are the hygienic conditions. The toilets are very bad and it is impossible to take a decent shower. Some toilets are detached from the walls, others are clogged. And then we have no hot water. There is heating in the rooms but it does not work”.
This is the testimony of M., one of the guests in one of the largest Bulgarian refugee camps in Harmanli, a town of just over 25,000 inhabitants less than 50 kilometres from the border with Turkey, in the district of Haskovo. His testimony was collected at the end of 2023 by the Collettivo rotte balcaniche Alto vicentino, which published a detailed report entitled “Torchlight” on the living conditions of migrants in Bulgaria at the beginning of January 2024.
“We felt the urgency to spread what we had seen as much as possible. Even among those who are interested in these issues, little is known about the Bulgarian border because there is no one to deal with it” – Collettivo rotte balcaniche Alto vicentino
Between 2020 and 2023, the Border violence monitoring network recorded 94 testimonies of refoulements from Bulgaria to Turkey or Greece, involving more than 1,824 people on the move. “The data collected is only the tip of the iceberg, as many other refoulements are not documented”. Rejections from Bulgaria are accompanied by violence that amounts to torture, inhuman and degrading treatment. In 2023, Bvmn interviewees reported physical violence such as kicking, beatings with truncheons, theft of personal belongings, including telephones (needed to communicate, request assistance, be in contact with legal representatives and loved ones), dog attacks (a constant practice of Bulgarian border guards that continues to go uninvestigated), use of firearms to ensure compliance, illegal detention and denial of food and medical services during deprivation of liberty.
The Bulgarian Helsinki Committee denounced that Bulgaria continues to apply different approaches to granting access to territory to asylum seekers compared to those fleeing the war in Ukraine. “While Ukrainian displaced people have rightly continued to have free access to the territory and available temporary protection, asylum seekers from the South, who have arrived in mixed migration flows, have continued to suffer in order to enter the country. This resulted in increasing refoulements along the external EU border with Turkey and the internal Schengen border with Greece. The national monitoring mechanism determined in 2023 something like ‘9,897 alleged refoulements involving 174,588 persons, a number almost double that recorded in 2022”.
The EU accepts these practices. Indeed, in March 2024 a “framework for cooperation on border and migration management” was agreed between Bulgaria and the European Commission, in line with the partial admission of Bulgaria and Romania to the Schengen bloc. Under this agreement, as the Border violence monitoring network recalls, Bulgaria receives EUR 85 million under the Border and Visa Management Instrument (BMVI) 2021-2027, designed to “improve national capacities at the EU’s external borders”. The BMVI makes it possible to apply for additional funding to extend or upgrade technology along state borders: motion detection and thermal imaging cameras, biometric data collection systems and border technology. In mid-June 2024, Bulgarian Police Chief Anton Zlatonov met with the Deputy Executive Director of the Frontex Agency in Brussels to talk about repatriations and field operations. “Two of the main outcomes of the meeting were Frontex’s commitment to continue providing 165 agents at the Bulgarian-Turkish border every month and the Agency’s promise to provide advanced support at the Bulgarian-Serbian border to prevent secondary movements of people”, Bvmn reported. Zlatonov also stated that Bulgaria would be ready to facilitate the strengthening of cooperation between Frontex and Turkey.
In 2024, 3.5 times fewer attempts to cross state borders were reportedly recorded than in 2023, and 15,000 attempts were “prevented” between January and May 2024 -compared to 55,000 in the same period in 2023
At the beginning of 2024, the organisation No Name Kitchen provided a first-hand description of the Harmanli camp, Bulgaria’s largest camp for asylum seekers, with around 1,700 “guests” at the time.
“After spending time in a detention camp, people on the move arrive there for a period of about six months waiting for the slow administration process to recognise their status. At the end of this, they explain that they often have to pay 450 euros to a ‘mediator’ to register an address and obtain a document. […] Life in the camp is characterised by the ubiquitous hostility of the security personnel (who only speak Bulgarian), the obsolete infrastructure and poor hygiene of common spaces. All residents describe the boredom of living in isolation, which increases tensions inside. […] A normal day begins with a head count at 8.30 am, during which security does not hesitate to use violence against latecomers. The rooms are overcrowded, with 15-30 people sleeping in bunk beds. The smell of clogged sinks in the toilets signals the lack of care for the basic infrastructure of the camp. Only a few sinks work and hot water in the showers is a luxury. Two meals are served, at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. The portions are poor and often barely edible. The market that usually sells food inside the camp is currently closed because security pretends to look for people selling drugs. This leads to arbitrary fines (15 to 30 euros) handed out to anyone accused of carrying food with the intention of selling it. The afternoon is an opportunity to meet friends and family, some of whom are still in Syria, some in Turkey, and some elsewhere. For the residents, Harmanli is the only legal way to seek asylum, as their fingerprints are stored in Eurodac, thus forcing them to stay in Bulgaria”.
Further reading:
• The work of the Collettivo rotte balcaniche Alto vicentino
• The latest report on Bulgaria in the Asylum information database (Aida)
Go to the other countries:
• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
Northern Macedonia
Following the European asylum system crisis of 2015, North Macedonia began to implement, and then increasingly refined, border control and management policies based on systematic refoulements and informal detention within confinement camps.
Situated at the centre of the Balkan route, between Greece and Serbia, in 2015 the country was crossed by about one million migrants, mostly Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis, coming from Turkey and heading towards Western Europe. In that year, the significant size of the transit migration phenomenon convinced the Macedonian government to declare a state of emergency, later extended every six months until today.
This emergency situation, which has become permanent, has allowed not only for the deployment of military forces on the borders but also for the opening of two so-called transit centres, Vinojiug and Tabanovce, which are still active nine years after the end of the migration crisis. These are extremely peripheral locations, close to the borders, one with Greece and one with Serbia, and far from population centres. They served to “manage” transit in an ‘organised and coordinated’ manner, providing temporary shelter for those who crossed the country to other destinations and were allowed to stay a maximum of 72 hours on national territory. Today, being without any legal basis justifying their existence and functionality, they can be defined as real confinement camps where men, women and even minors are detained for weeks or even months waiting for informal readmission to Greece or Serbia.
In addition to these, there are two other institutional centres established legally by the Macedonian government in the early 2000s in a non-emergency period and with national funds. They are the Vizbegovo and Gazi Baba centres for asylum seekers both located in the suburbs of Skopje and defined by the law as reception centres, but they are actually administrative detention centres for foreigners in an irregular condition.
As visible in the image, the Gazi Baba centre is located between a residential area and a wooded one. It was built in an existing accommodation structure (in bungalows or similar) and up to 150 people can be held inside. No one has access to it except the staff of the Ministry of the Interior that runs it and the National Ombudsman. Known for its systematic violation of fundamental rights, denounced by non-governmental and international organisations, it also houses victims of human trafficking who are witnesses in criminal proceedings against traffickers (in violation of domestic, European and international law).
The camps, the arbitrary administrative detention, the informal and unlawful refoulements, are clear expressions of a policy of confinement, a practice of space management that violates fundamental rights and freedoms, in the absence of any form of control.
The Vizbegovo reception centre, established in 2008 in an existing accommodation facility, is managed by the Ministry of Social Policy. It is located in an isolated neighbourhood, surrounded by landfills and production areas, and can accommodate 150 people (and up to 250 people in case of need). In September 2023, it housed 26 asylum seekers who are provided with food and accommodation, health care, interpretation services, legal assistance and an integration path that consists of Macedonian language teaching, vocational training and job placement within the centre.
The Vinojiug transit centre is located about 500 metres from the border near the towns of Idomeni, Greece, and Gevgelija, North Macedonia, but in an isolated rural area that is difficult to reach. The camp is very large with an official capacity of 120 people and consists of large structures with tents that have been there for years and containers. A barbed wire wall that continues for kilometres on several sides borders it.
The Tabanovce transit centre is located about 400 metres from the border with Serbia, close to a small village and the railway tracks connecting this border with the southern border of the country -an aspect that recalls the images from 2015-2016 of trains closed from the outside, crowded with migrants intercepted at the border with Greece-. Even today, the camp is used for the stay of everyone who is tracked down in transit to Serbia or who has been rejected by it, but also for those who are transferred there due to a shortage of places at the Vinojiug centre. Tabanovce has a capacity of 130 people housed in small containers. It is also possible to recognise three large tents for about a hundred people.
Further reading:
• Erminia Rizzi and Ivana Stojanova’s chapter on North Macedonia in the book “Chiusi dentro”
Go to the other countries:
• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
Serbia
As reported in the chapter of the book “Chiusi dentro” dedicated to the Republic of Serbia by Nikola Kovačević, a human rights lawyer from Belgrade, Serbia is surrounded by the external borders of the European Union and for this reason could become an important facilitator for the implementation of the recent reform of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS), which includes a strong component of externalisation and more frequent use of border procedures.
However, the Serbian asylum and migration management system, at its current level of development, is not able to protect the human rights of people on the move. This is due to inadequate reception facilities and illegal refoulements to North Macedonia, described by Rados Djurovic, Executive Director of the Centre for Asylum Protection in Serbia, as a regular practice.
This system consists of 19 facilities, seven intended for the accommodation of asylum seekers (such as the asylum centres in Sjenica, Obrenovac and Krnjača) and 12 reception centres (Subotica, Sombor, Dimitrovgrad, Presevo) accommodating all other foreign nationals, totalling 8,155 beds. Most of these were opened in 2015-2016, when the influx of refugees and migrants on the Western Balkan route peaked. They are designed for short stays and to meet only basic needs: accommodation, food, urgent medical care, clothing and footwear. The lack of long-term planning, together with the fact that the centres are located in areas of the country with a high rate of social deprivation or in remote areas, means that foreign nationals are unwilling to stay there. In fact, many decide to move to the border areas with EU countries or to stay at the thirty unofficial settlements spread along the borders with Croatia, Hungary and Romania.
The Sjenica centre has a capacity of 350 people and is located inside an old converted industrial building, close to working factories and a residential area. It has no visible external structure, everything takes place inside. The conformation of the building suggests that it consists of one very large space separated by temporary structures.
On the border with Hungary, the temporary centre in Subotica is located near a sewage treatment plant. It consists of container units and small tents in the courtyard of a farmhouse that can accommodate 220 people.
The centre in Obrenovac was one of the two largest ones, with a capacity of a thousand people. It is located in the sports area of a military base close to a river and a large industrial facility. As of 2020 (the date of the picture above), it can be seen a large tensile structure and a series of tents surrounding. As early as 2021, the temporary structures are dismantled. Now it appears to be either no longer in use or only partially used, in some existing buildings.
Sombor was a centre with a capacity of 380 people, which is apparently in disuse today. On the border with Croatia, it is located in the proximity of an existing structure, immersed in a wooded area and connected by a secondary road to an inhabited area. In 2022 (the date of the picture), numerous tents and semi-informal camps could be seen around the centre.
The Dimitrovgrad camp is located in an industrial area on the border with Bulgaria and consists of a large temporary structure and more than eight containers surrounding it that can accommodate ninety people. The picture from above shows how it is separated by two settlements on either side, on one side by a river, on the other by the railway. At the end of May 2023, it was not operational.
The Krnjača centre has a capacity of one thousand people and is a converted former military base on the eastern outskirts of Belgrade. A pre-existing informal settlement is visible nearby. It is impressive for its “concentrationary” nature. In the past, it was also used to host war refugees from the 1990s.
Finally, Presevo is a centre on the border with North Macedonia, with a capacity of 1,100 people. Large temporary structures are evident within abandoned industrial complexes near the railway. During peak periods (2017-2019) there were numerous small tents in the open spaces.
Recent videos submitted to the Guardian by Legis, a Macedonian NGO, show half-naked men near the border between Serbia and North Macedonia, exposed to the cold and forced to return from Serbia to North Macedonia. Legis argues that the videos, recorded by a local witness near the village of Lojane on 10 February 2024 and published by the British newspaper on 22 February, represent the second case of abusive and degrading refoulement in 24 hours, involving more than 50 people, identified as Syrian, being forced to strip naked or remain in their underwear by Serbian authorities before being sent back to North Macedonia. Jasmin Redjepi, president of Legis, denounced these pushbacks as disturbing and degrading acts, which occurred shortly after a summit on EU-Serbian border cooperation.
Further reading:
• Nikola Kovačević chapter on Serbia from the book “Chiusi dentro”
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• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
Bosnia and Herzegovina
According to data from the World Organisation for Migration (IOM), from 2017 to August 2024 164,524 people transited through Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has become one of the main gateways to the European Union. Precisely in the ten cantons of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the EU tested for the first time the “camp-system” in a third country promoted through different strategies clearly visible, for example, in the Canton Una Sana, in the northwestern part of the country. Thanks to substantial European funding, since May 2018 on the one hand people have been concentrated in decaying and degraded camps, and on the other hand reception places have been limited, fostering a policy of abandonment of those who choose or are forced, due to lack of alternatives, to live in informal conditions and fuelling a policy of hatred and discrimination.
For many people on the move in the Balkan region, Bosnia and Herzegovina represents the last step to enter the European Union, one of the most difficult if one does not have the documents required by the current human mobility regime
At the end of 2023 there were seven camps operating in the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and of these only three are institutional camps under direct state control, the other four are so-called Temporary reception centres (Trc) run mainly by the IOM with a total of 5,492 places. The turnover in the centres is very high: between 5 and 18 August 2024, 3,566 people arrived and 3,593 left the facilities, with 1,788 migrants in reception. Transit and reception centres are often located in remote places, leading to de facto confinement of people.
The Salakovac Refugee Reception Centre is managed by the Ministry of Human Rights and Refugees of Bosnia and Herzegovina and provides limited accommodation and basic and essential services for asylum seekers, refugees and persons granted subsidiary protection.
Delijaš, on the other hand, is the official asylum centre built in 2014 with the help of EU funds in the municipality of Trnovo, 30 kilometres south-east of Sarajevo. It is managed by the Asylum Department of the Ministry of Security and is located in the high mountains, with no access to internet or telephone network, and with irregular transport lines. It has 154 beds, but due to its remote location its occupancy is very limited, so that in the summer of 2022 it housed only eight asylum seekers.
The Lukavica detention centre accommodates migrants who have been denied international protection and are waiting to leave the country. The Lukavica detention centre is located in the capital’s Serbian district of the same name, is managed by the Ministry of Security and is nicknamed “the Guantanamo of Sarajevo”.
The facility in which the Temporary Reception Centre in Borići is located is a former student house situated near the multi-purpose stadium in the city of Bihać, one kilometre from the centre. It was converted into a formal camp in 2018, after the difficult situation created in the squat of the nearby park became unliveable. The camp is managed by the IOM, with a capacity of 580 people and accommodates families and unaccompanied minors, who must comply with a 4pm curfew.
The Lipa camp, on the other hand, is located on a plateau 800 metres above sea level, 24 kilometres from Bihać, the nearest town, and therefore far from all public services such as pharmacies, hospitals, supermarkets, post offices and stations. The camp is connected to the main road with a dirt road not easily accessible and it is surrounded by stretches of woods dotted with signs warning of the danger of death from mines left unexploded from the war in the 1990s. The Lipa camp was deliberately located in this isolated area, and this extremely peripheral location limits all forms of contact of the ‘received’ people with the outside world and prevents their integration into the social network of the city. A de facto detention that restricts personal freedom, the impossibility of actually building a life of social relations with the outside world, including minors.
The Lipa camp
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Above: the transformation of the Lipa camp between 2020 (in December it burnt out completely) and 2023
The Sarajevo canton hosts the Ušivak Trc, built in the municipality of Hadžići in October 2018, and the Blažuj Trc, which began providing temporary accommodation solutions during the winter of 2019.
The Vučjak camp in the canton of Bihać was purposely set up by the Bosnian authorities on a rubbish dump where migrants and refugees rounded up in the territory were deported. To a casual outside observer, that camp, lacking the most basic sanitary and housing facilities, might have appeared in its extreme degradation to be an informal and free camp, whereas it was in fact a completely controlled confinement camp in which particularly harsh living conditions were imposed on those confined. In mid-December 2019, it was cleared out.
Further reading:
• Silvia Carbonari’s chapter on Bosnia and Herzegovina in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• Anna Brambilla and Caterina Bove’s chapter on readmissions, disguised forms of refoulement in the book “Chiusi dentro“
• The work of the association “Lungo la rotta balcanica”
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• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland • Lithuania
Hungary
In Hungary has been in force for almost ten years a kind of state of exception, instrumentally called ‘state of crisis for mass migration’. Once in place and ordered by decree, the Hungarian Defence Forces have been entrusted with the armed protection of the border and assistance to the police in dealing with migration issues. It is the wall on which Viktor Orbán has speculated, in the concrete inaction of the European Union.
In mid-September 2015, this “regime” was declared first in the two counties bordering Serbia (Bács-Kiskun and Csongrád) and soon after in the four counties bordering Croatia, Slovenia and Austria (Baranya, Somogy, Vas, Zala). On 9 March 2016, it was extended to the entire territory of Hungary. It was prolonged until 7 September 2024 (latest information available from the Asylum Information Database).
“During this state of crisis, special rules apply to third-country nationals who enter and/or stay irregularly in Hungary and to asylum seekers”, recalls the Hungarian Helsinki Committee. The police is authorised to reject across the border barrier, without any assessment of individual circumstances, migrants staying “irregularly” and wishing to seek asylum in Hungary from anywhere in the country, outside of any legal procedure or possibility of appeal. The deadlines for filing a judicial appeal against inadmissibility decisions and rejection of asylum applications decided under accelerated procedures were drastically reduced to just three days.
In mid-September 2015 the barbed wire wall along the 175-kilometre section of the border with Serbia was completed. A similar fence was built on the border with Croatia. The so-called “transit zones” were established as parts of these fences. Until 26 May 2020, asylum could only be claimed within these transit zones.
Illegal entry into Hungary is punishable by effective or suspended prison sentences of up to ten years, and/or the imposition of a deportation order. Criminal proceedings are not suspended when the defendant applies for asylum. The non-penalisation of irregular entry provided for in the 1951 Refugee Convention is buried. From 28 March 2017 to 21 May 2020, all asylum seekers entering the Röszke and Tompa transit zones were effectively detained, although the Hungarian authorities always refused to acknowledge that this was detention.
In March 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the confinement of an Iranian-Afghan family, including three minor children, in the Röszke transit zone was an unlawful detention in violation of Article 5 and inhuman and degrading treatment in violation of Article 3 of the Convention. A year later, the Court came to similar conclusions that placement in the transit zone constituted detention, in several cases involving families with children.
The trend of asylum applications presented in Hungary in recent years describes this European abyss: from 177,135 officially registered applications in 2015 to 30 (thirty) in 2023.
On 13 June 2024, the Court of Justice of the European Union condemned Hungary for the clear violation of European asylum rules: two hundred million euros plus a penalty of one million euros for each day of violation. “Deliberately evading the application of a common EU policy constitutes a violation of exceptional gravity”, the Court’s judges wrote.
The ruling also covers the detention of asylum seekers in the Röszke and Tompa transit camps on the border with Serbia. Hungary argued that it had complied with the ruling by having “closed” those camps over time.
Further reading:
• The report by the Hungarian Helsinki Committee on Hungary for the Asylum information database (Aida)
• The chapter on Hungary written by Federica Tourn from the book “Sui confini d’Europa” (manifestolibri, 2023)
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Croatia
In the years of the collapse of the European asylum system, Croatia has continued to violently reject people in transit and asylum seekers, with increasing intensity since 2016. Particularly towards Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia. Pushbacks and inhuman and degrading conduct by Croatian authorities include deportations, abandonments in forests, up to the death of some people and minors. These actions have been irrefutably documented with photographs and videos thanks to the work of human rights organisations on the ground (among them, Are you syriuos, the Centre for Peace Studies Zagreb, the Border Violence Monitoring Network) and international journalistic investigations.
On 1 January 2023, the country joined the Schengen area and the Eurozone. That same month, the European Court of Human Rights had ruled on the “Daraibou case”. The case concerned an applicant of Moroccan nationality who had been detained at a Croatian border police station together with three other migrants in March 2015. Taken to the nearest police station, in Bajakovo, to await deportation to Serbia, the migrants were placed in the “irregular migrants” detention rooms of the border police station. One of them allegedly set fire to the facility, causing the death of three migrants and serious injuries to Daraibou. The European Court condemned Zagreb for failing to take sufficient measures to protect the lives and safety of the migrants and for failing to conduct a sufficiently detailed and effective investigation. The judgment became final on 14 April 2023.
This is not the only case. At the end of November 2017, a family of Afghan origin arrived in Croatia and was rejected, deprived of the right to seek asylum and forced by Croatian police to return to Serbia by walking along the railway between Tovarnik and Šid. Madina, the family’s six-year-old daughter, was run over and killed by a passing train.
Tovarnik is one of two transit centres for foreigners opened in 2017 along with Trilj, the latter near the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina. It serves as a detention centre and the latest available data indicate a capacity of 62 places. Close to the border point, it has the layout of a semi-prison structure, with a concrete boundary wall, divided into separate blocks, a fenced-in sports area inside, more than 12,000 square metres in total.
Trilj is also in theory equipped with 62 places. It is a three-four-storey building, built on two separate blocks with a total area of 3,500 square metres. There are no boundary walls or high fences, and there is a complete absence of outdoor or leisure/sports areas. It is on the edge of the residential centre but in an area with basic services.
The third Croatian detention centre is in Ježevo, 30 kilometres from Zagreb. It is in an isolated location, next to the motorway and a parking area. The total area exceeds 15,000 square metres. Here, too, the facility is semi-custodial and the concrete boundary wall is lined with barbed wire.
At the end of 2023, in Dugi Dol a temporary-closed centre was opened, under the administration of the Karlovac police. According to the Ministry of Interior, 109 containers were placed, 65 of them for accommodation with eight beds each, with a capacity of more than 500 persons. On paper, all individuals found by police officers in the Karlovac area who express their intention to apply for international protection should be brought to the centre to be registered. After the registration process, the applicants should be transported by bus to the “reception” centres in Kutina and Zagreb. The centre became operational on 19 November 2023 and 211 applicants were registered on 5 January 2024.
In this image from 2024, it is visible that the centre of Dugi Dol is located in an extremely isolated area, in a forest clearing about 2.5 kilometres from the small village of the same name and about 20 kilometres from Karlovac (the nearest centre).
Further reading
• The work of, among others, the Centre for Peace Studies in Zagreb, the Are You Syrious association and the Border violence monitoring network;
• The chapter on Croatia edited by Diego Saccora from the book “Sui confini d’Europa” (manifestolibri, 2023)
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Albania
The “sprawling beast” of detention promoted by Italy has crossed national borders. According to the Italy-Albania protocol, announced on 6 November 2023, some of the people who reach our country (Lampedusa) will be transferred to northwestern Albania. In Shëngjin, a coastal town of about 13,000 people, the hotspot where people will be identified after disembarkation was opened on 5 June 2024. A seven-metre-high wall surrounds the facility with cameras installed around the edges to monitor what happens along the outer perimeter. It is located inside the port and is surrounded by residential buildings and a large amusement park on the left side.
Moving twenty kilometres inland from Shëngjin one reaches Gjadër, a former airbase built during the communist era. In the early 1990s, the CIA used it to carry out espionage missions in the former Federal Republics of Yugoslavia. The last jet took off from Gjadër in 2004 and the base, with its rich history, has remained largely unoccupied by the Albanian army. On the barren hill, the construction of three facilities is nearing its completion. The first structure, with 880 places, is supposed to accommodate asylum seekers undergoing the border procedure, whose detention is expected to last a maximum of 28 days. The second, with 144 places, should instead function as a Centre of Permanence for Repatriation (CPR). The third, with 20 places, will in fact be a prison and will be used for those who commit crimes inside the other two.
Further reading:
• Duccio Facchini’s chapter on Italy and Albania in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• Kristina Millona‘s August 2024 report from Albania in Altreconomia
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Italy
Hotspot, Cpr, Cara, Cpa, Cas. So many acronyms, often incomprehensible to most, and a single objective: to limit the freedom of movement of foreigners, even when they are declared “welcome”. These are very different places which in our country give life to the “tentacular beast” of detention -to use the words of lawyer Maurizio Veglio- which has taken place since 1998. It is in fact the current Centres of Permanence for Repatriation (CPR) that were the first experiments in Italy of places to confine foreigners for administrative offences and not crimes. A model that was later joined by the hotspot system, with facilities located at disembarkation points where people who have just arrived on Italian territory are identified. There were four in 2017, there are more than twice as many today. A growth that is not destined to stop: the so-called “Cutro decree”, sadly named after the site of the 26 February 2023 massacre, in fact envisages the opening of ‘similar structures’ to hotspots throughout the national territory and no longer only at disembarkation points.
“The simple observation of the places of administrative detention, de facto and de jure, of non-citizens – in Italy as in the world – allows us to state that what takes place within them is a ritual of separation on an ethnic basis” – Maurizio Veglio, Questione giustizia
This quick trip to Italy can therefore only start from the Centres of Permanence for Repatriation present in ten cities in eight different regions. In 2023, 6,620 people passed through them, less than 50 per cent of whom were then repatriated to their countries of origin. The capacity of the facilities has been reduced in the last two years due to the numerous protests of the detainees over the living conditions that have made entire areas of the facilities unusable in some cases. This is the case of the ‘Brunelleschi’ in Turin, which was opened in 1999 and then temporarily closed in March 2023 following a riot, the consequences of which can be seen on one of the roofs in the image (below). The facility is located in a residential district of the Piedmontese capital and has an official capacity of 210. It is scheduled to reopen in November 2024. In the facility, Hossain Faisal, 32, originally from Bangladesh, died of cardiac arrest on the night of 7-8 July 2019 and Moussa Balde, 23, died by suicide on the night of 22-23 May 2021 inside one of the ‘henhouse cages’ of the hospital, an isolation section within the CPR. The trial on Balde’s death is currently ongoing.
Also Milan’s CPR is located in a residential neighbourhood (“Ortica”) in the shadow of the East beltway. Between 2013 and 2019, the facility functioned as a reception centre and was then transformed into a Centre of Permanence for Repatriation, officially opened on 28 September 2020. Initially there were 148 places planned in the facility but those actually available have always been around 70. The living conditions inside the facility have been described as inhuman by the Milan Public Prosecutor’s Office, which at the end of December 2023 ordered the commissioning of the Cpr
In Palazzo San Gervasio, in the province of Potenza, investigators reconstructed the abuse and violence to which the detainees were exposed. This Cpr was opened in 2018 and has an official capacity of 128 places. On 5 August 2024, Belmaan Oussama, 22, originally from Morocco, was found dead in his cell twenty-four hours after he fell ill. His death is under investigation by the public prosecutor’s office.
In Sardinia, and more precisely in Macomer, in the province of Nuoro, on 20 January 2020, a 50-place CPR was inaugurated, according to the official capacity, in an former maximum-security prison that was later closed in 2014 due to the inadequacy of the structure with respect to the parameters set by the prison regulations. A double fence, clearly visible, surrounds the facility. In 2023 the average stay in the centre for detainees was 52 days. The longest in Italy.
The images from above of the Ponte Galeria CPR in Rome and that of Gradisca d’Isonzo, in the province of Gorizia, are impressive. The high grates surrounding the areas where the detainees are held are clearly visible. Then, in the case of Gradisca, next to the CPR stands a Cara -acronym for Reception Centre for Asylum Seekers- with 650 places. An inadequate mixture that also occurs in other places in Italy (such as Bari and Caltanissetta among others). In the CPR of Gradisca d’Isonzo, between 2020 and 2022, four detainees died (Vakhtang Enukidze, Anani Ezzeddine, Arshad Jahangir, Orgest Turia) while in Rome, inside the facility, 22-year-old Ousmane Sylla, originally from Guinea, died by suicide on 4 February 2024.
The other administrative detention centres are the Apulian CPRs of Bari-Palese and Brindisi-Restinco, and the Sicilian one of Caltanissetta-Pian del Lago.
In Bari, the centre occupies 18,000 square metres in a peripheral area with no services, close to the Guardia di Finanza barracks. The structure is prison-like, with single-storey herringbone blocks and a central corridor, an outer concrete wall and an inner double fence with a patrol road.
The Brindisi centre is slightly smaller, 17,000 square metres, in an extremely isolated area about ten kilometres from the city and without any services. Here, too, the structure is prison-like: an outer concrete wall and internal fences/partitions. It consists partly of prefabricated and partly of multi-storey buildings. The courtyards are also fenced off, as are the “sports” areas. In the same complex, in addition to the Cpr, there is also the former Cara, with people in close contact. The former Cara has recently become a place where unaccompanied minors are transferred, under inhuman and degrading conditions of de facto detention, on which the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 2024.
The Caltanissetta CPR is also located in a peripheral area characterised by the scarcity of services, near the stadium. The site covers an area of over 65,000 square metres. The facility is heterogeneous: metal fencing all around with an alternation of prefabricated buildings, green and leisure areas, and larger brick buildings (apparently always intended for “reception”). Inside the complex there is a prison-style part, separated by a concrete wall and with internal compartments. Next to the existing detention facility, another one will be built to increase the detention capacity. In mid-March 2024, an EUR 11.7 million tender was launched for the construction of ‘three accommodation blocks with a total of 56 places’. The works also concern the road network outside the centre, the thermal and electrical installations as well as the construction of a new seven-metre high security fence.
There are not only CPR in Italy. As mentioned, the places of confinement and restriction of the personal freedom of foreigners are growing. Starting with the hotspots, which have emerged since 2015 at the request of the European Union with the aim of identifying migrants immediately after disembarkation. These facilities are hybrid in nature, depriving people of their freedom for several days, but there is no legal norm that clearly states that this practice is possible. Hotspots are often overcrowded, with inadequate sanitary conditions for detainees. On 30 March 2023, for example, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Italy for the unlawful detention and inadequate material conditions in which foreign nationals (including minors) were held in the Lampedusa hotspot. Among the first to be opened in 2015, together with those in Trapani, Pozzallo and Taranto.
The Taranto centre
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Above: the centre of Taranto, built in 2016 in a parking lot for trucks. The area is residual between the railway line and the port access road junctions, extremely isolated from the urban context. The structure is fenced off with a double concrete barrier. it is visible a large central tensile structure with a series of gazebos and containers. It has remained practically unchanged since its construction.
Over the years the hotspots have grown in number and with the “Cutro decree” the network of hybrid structures will expand further. The new regulations allow for the detention of asylum seekers from countries considered safe until their request for protection is finalised.
To see what it means to institutionally condemn thousands of people to a condition of marginality, it is useful to return to Apulia, specifically to Borgo Mezzanone, one of the many ‘ghettos’ that characterise the province of Foggia. We are in the outskirts and partly on the runway of a disused military airport once used by the American army in the Second World War and then as a logistics base during the Balkan war in the 1990s. The peculiarity of this “ghetto” is that it arose close to the government reception centre for asylum seekers (Cara) established as a temporary facility in 1999 and then stabilised. The evolution is continuous but it is between 2016 and today that the growth has been explosive. It is a city in its own right. Testimonies from the place tell that at certain times there are as many as five thousand admissions. But it is a stable “ghetto”, which does not only come into being with the harvesting season of the countryside. Over the past few years, there has been an attempt to build modules to accommodate some people, such as seasonal workers, in the small space between the government building, the settlement and the former runway. This part, however, has in fact become a limbo, an occupied, fenced-off place, where conditions are paradoxically even worse than the “former runway”. And it is impressive because in the pictures we publish there are visible the former Cara, the “limbo” and then the settlement. In 2023 the modules were demolished but an army-controlled fence remained where inside there are other rebuilt modules with people inside. So there are three de facto “ghettos”: one governmental (the Cara), one institutional (the attempted reception modules) and the other informal. Almost 25 years have not been enough to guarantee public intervention that could overcome the “ghetto” model. On the contrary, the government intervention has created further “non-places”, without any clear legal definition.
Borgo Mezzanone, Foggia
A detail of the Borgo Mezzanone settlement in 2023
Apulia, together with Sicily, is the Italian region most affected by confinement and “ghettoisation”, as witnessed by the number of camps: two CPRs, three governmental centres ex-CARA, one hotspot. Until about two years ago, of the numerous informal camps, there were as many as eleven in the province of Foggia alone.
From precariousness to confinement. The confinement of foreigners can also be found on the internal borders of the European Union. One example is the French-Italian border, closed (only on paper) since 2015. People attempt to cross the border but are intercepted by the French police and taken to the Menton police station where special containers have been installed to detain -sometimes for whole nights, without water and food- people who are then taken back to Italy.
In Ventimiglia, the migrants rejected cannot find shelters in which they take relief before attempting the crossing again. The last “institutional” camp was closed in the late summer of 2020 and was in the Roya camp, about five kilometres inland from the city centre. Since it was cleared, people have been living in the open, often on the banks of the Roya river. Since February 2024, France has put an end to systematic rejections thanks to a ruling by the Council of State in Paris that declared the French authorities’ procedure illegal. Although in reduced numbers, some people continue to be readmitted to Italy.
Further reading:
• Duccio Facchini’s chapter on Italy in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• Asgi’s reports on Italy for the Asylum information database (Aida)
• Investigations by Luca Rondi and Lorenzo Figoni published in Altreconomia on the abuse of psychotropic drugs in Italian Cpr and the prefectures’ lack of controls
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France
The town of Calais, on the northern coast of France and the point where the English Channel is narrowest, has been the scene of an inhuman script that has been repeated for almost thirty years. In 1999, in fact, the French authorities opened the Sangatte centre with 600 places to ‘manage’ the flow coming from the Balkans. Afghan, Kurdish and Iranian people crowded the facility that, on 30 December 2002, was closed under pressure from the London government. However, people continued to arrive, building over time a kind of slum with no sanitary facilities, soon renamed the “jungle”. The first eviction was in 2009, seven years after the closure of Sangatte, but it was a temporary “solution”. The camps resumed immediately and increased during the so-called “migration crisis” -which in reality was the crisis of the European asylum system- in 2015.
In January 2015, the French government announced the first new reception centre for migrants in Calais, initially just tents to distribute food and recharge phones, then the opening of a 500-seat dormitory. Around that inadequate “institutional” response, however, an informal settlement has once again developed, according to many the largest ever in Europe, which has arrived to host more than 11,000 people.
At the end of October 2016, the French authorities once again evacuated what had in fact become a village with restaurants, small businesses, even mosques and schools, set up with wood and plastic. In four days, with 1,250 agents deployed on the ground, around six thousand people were relocated to various French reception centres, but at least three to four thousand reportedly left the camp, refusing other locations. On the evening of 26 October 2016, a vast fire destroyed a large part of the jungle in a few hours, which no longer exists today.
Calais
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People, however, continue to arrive. Frontex, the agency that monitors European borders, recorded 62,067 attempts to cross the Channel in 2023, with 36,704 arrivals on British shores, a third less than in 2022. The absence of institutional reception forces people to camp, mainly using tents and emergency shelters.
“The journey becomes more difficult when it starts from places further away from the English coast. The crossing time in small boats from Boulogne-sur-Mer to the UK doubles and the journey is more dangerous. A few weeks ago, we welcomed a group of Iranian people who walked 30 kilometres to get back here: they had tried to board a boat in Boulogne-sur-Mer, but they failed” – Jeanne Bonnet, head of La Margelle shelter
Police control is strict. In 2023, the NGO Human rights observer recorded 701 forced evictions involving 19,365 people (of whom 271 were arrested). 2,181 tents and 241 sleeping bags were confiscated. Moreover, there is the attempt to make encampment and distribution sites uninhabitable: in recent years, after the request of the municipality, more than 800 tonnes of boulders have been dumped in certain areas in the centre and suburbs of Calais, to prevent migrants from pitching their tents or associations from delivering food and material.
From January to mid-September 2024, 39 people lost their lives trying to reach the UK, the highest number of casualties since 2021, when 40 were recorded for the whole year.
Further reading:
• Davide Pignata’s reportage from Calais in April 2024 on Altreconomia
• The work of Human Rights Observers in Calais and Grande-Synthe
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Spain
Arguineguín, in the south of the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, is one of the most frequent arrival points of the so-called Atlantic route of people in transit to Europe, crossed between January and July 2024 by more than 21,000 people, an increase of 180% compared to the same period last year. Also Frontex, the agency that monitors European borders, recorded this escalation, since according to its data ‘irregular crossings’ increased by 154% (January-July 2024) making it one of the main arrival routes for migrants to Europe.
This is the crossing from West Africa to the Canary Islands, a Spanish territory in the Atlantic Ocean. The countries of origin of the people who face this route are mainly Mali, Senegal, Morocco and Western Sahara, Ivory Coast and Guinea-Conakry, but also Mauritania, Gambia and Nigeria. The sea journey, depending on the point of departure -as Chiara Fabbro wrote in Altreconomia-covers a distance ranging from a hundred to two thousand kilometres. It means spending days and nights on board of small and overcrowded boats, which are even more precarious due to the recent trend towards the use of rubber dinghies instead of wooden boats. Engine problems are common, as well as disorientation, and people on board can drift for days, if not weeks. When food and water supplies run out, the only hope is to be spotted by a passing boat, often a merchant ship or fishing boat, which can alert rescue. For these reasons, the Canary Islands is one of the deadliest routes: the World Organisation for Migration estimates 959 missing persons in 2023 compared to 2,526 in the Mediterranean Sea, which, however, has more crossings. In total, at least 3,926 people have died trying to reach the Spanish island since 2014. Currently, one of the emergencies concerns accompanied foreign minors: as of July 2024, there would be at least 6,000 on the archipelago.
Civil society organisations have repeatedly denounced the poor conditions in which people detained in centres in the Canary Islands live in terms of respect of their fundamental rights and access to food, water, hygiene; with serious impacts on their psychological well-being. In May 2022, a report by the Spanish civic ombudsman denounced the serious gaps in the protection of vulnerable people including the lack of specialised psychological assistance and the lack of information to minors on their right to obtain international protection as well as the failure to identify potential victims of human trafficking.
The centre in the Las Raices area (below) was set up in a military camp in La Laguna, a town ten kilometres from the capital Santa Cruz de Tenerife. At the beginning of November 2023, the City Council of La Laguna passed a motion (the only vote against was by Vox) that in 21 points asserts the city’s nature as an ‘open and welcoming municipality’, reaffirming the municipality’s rejection of a reception model based on macro-centres.
The Las Raices camp
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The structure in Fuerteventura (below) functions partly as a Cie (Centre for Identification and Expulsion) and partly as a Cate (Centros de Atención Temporal de Extranjeros, centre for temporary assistance). It has a capacity of more than a thousand places and ‘accommodates’ both adults (women and men) and minors. In the Cate happens identification and post-boarding registration by the national police and people can be detained -on paper- for a maximum of 72 hours.
The Fuerteventura camp
Further reading:
• The latest report on Spain presented by the Asylum information database (Aida)
Go to the other countries:
• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Poland • Lithuania
Poland
According to the Polish border police, from August 2021 to August 2023, 73,000 people attempted to cross the Polish-Belarus border. Since the summer of 2021 tens of thousands of people mostly from Middle Eastern countries (Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan) have tried to reach Poland after arriving in Belarus, and the North-Eastern migration route has become one of the primary corridors for trying to access Northern European countries.
The border police is in charge of deciding what happens to people intercepted once they have crossed the border and in most cases this involves a pushback, even if there is an explicit request for asylum. Pushback marks the entry into a limbo where on the one hand entry into Poland is prohibited and on the other hand return to Belarus is dangerous.
Reports of discriminatory and manipulative behaviour by border police towards detainees are a common feature of the various centres. Detained migrants within the camp are identified and called not by their own name, but by a number.
The majority of people who escape refoulement (in 2021, according to Balkan insight, 94% of non-refouled persons) are transferred to one of six detention centres (closed centres) spread all over the country, either in urban areas or in hard-to-reach and poorly serviced forested areas, with a total capacity of 1,737 persons (October 2023). Managed as maximum-security prisons by the border police themselves and surrounded by masonry walls and barbed wire – access is granted only to the Unchr- they present numerous critical issues such as poor and insufficient legal and medical assistance for the detained, even vulnerable people. Those whose asylum applications are accepted are instead sent to reception structures (open centres) which, at the beginning of 2023, were nine and capable of accommodating up to 1,714 people.
The centre in Wedrzin (above), in the west of the country, was built in September 2021 in an isolated structure five kilometres from the nearest centre and within a large military complex that includes a firing range in addition to warehouses and fuel and weapons depots. Simulations with tanks and armoured vehicles are also carried out there. The migrants, most of them from places of conflict such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia or Eritrea, are then subjected to the sound of gunfire and assault weapons.
The extremely isolated location of the Lesznowola centre is impressive, immersed in a forest more than two kilometres from the nearest small villages and 15 kilometres from Warsaw. The image shows how the facility is fenced off with lined buildings and green and sports areas inside. It provides, in addition to the regular capacity of 200 people, additional places for the isolation of those who have violated or are at risk of violating camp rules (strict detention centres). At the end of 2023, there were 48 persons detained. Families with children or unaccompanied minors are placed here. From 2020, a nearby extension with a large three-storey structure is under construction, it is not known whether for management or detention purposes.
The detention centre in Kętrzyn, in the north of the country, is located in a rural area within a large converted institutional centre, surrounded by vast green areas and numerous buildings and service rooms. Until 2023, it was intended for families, but was later converted into a facility for men only. As reported by Voxeurope, Aleksandra Pulchny, a member of theAssociation for Legal Intervention in Warsaw, thinks this may have happened because the court responsible for examining cases in that centre had become too “pro-children”.
In the south east of the country there is the Przemyśl centre. In addition to the regular capacity of 147 persons, this centre has a number of places for those who have not or are at risk of not complying with the rules imposed in the detention centres. According to the European Council on Refugees and Exiles (Ecre), there were 24 migrants at the end of 2023. An asylum seeker placed in such a centre, more similar to a prison than a supervised centre, has to stay in his cell for a large part of the day and even has to knock on the door to be taken to the toilet.
Further reading:
• Davide Pignata chapter on Poland in “Chiusi dentro”
Go to the other countries:
• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Lithuania
Lithuania
Lithuania is an obscure pioneer, in terms of both arbitrary detention and the legalisation of refoulement. Since July 2021, the country’s authorities have adopted laws, policies and practices aimed at preventing people from seeking asylum, including the automatic and totally arbitrary detention of anyone crossing the border into Belarus in a way deemed “irregular”, locking men, women and minors in militarised centres mockingly presented as “temporary accommodation” or “alternatives to detention”.
An Amnesty International report in June 2022 showed how thousands of refugees and migrants were held “for many months in squalid prison-like centres”, where they were denied access to ‘fair asylum procedures’ and were subjected to other “serious human rights violations”, in the hope that they would “voluntarily” return to the countries from which they had fled. The humanitarian organisation interviewed dozens of people who were illegaly detained from countries such as Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq, Nigeria, Syria and Sri Lanka.
At Kybartai -a prison until September 2021, to understand the original nature- there were barred windows, security doors and a high perimeter wall with people inside responsible for nothing but escaping suffering. The hundreds of recluses had little freedom of movement, hot showers only twice a week, sinks and toilets deemed “squalid”, barbed wire all around.
At the Medininkai centre, people “locked in” were forced to sleep in containers on a football pitch and to go to the toilet they were forced to go outside, walking in the snow of the harsh Lithuanian winter. Faced with protests, the authorities responded with beatings, pepper spray, taser guns, and unleashed dogs on them. Some women recounted abuse and humiliation, with horrific scenes and a racist background. The evolution shown by our satellite images reveals that the centre was set up after 2017 in the sports field of the military school of the border guard. The structure is extremely compact with containers placed side by side on the long side in blocks separated by very narrow spaces and paths.
The Medininkai camp
Clicca sul cursore al centro dell’immagine, tieni premuto e scorri a destra o a sinistra per osservare l’evoluzione nel tempo
“Josephine”, a young woman from sub-Saharan Africa interviewed by Amnesty International, said that the Lithuanian “guards” would tell her and her companions phrases like: “We are sending you to the forest to hunt”. And when you were sick and asked for an ambulance – Josephine continued- “they told you that they would only call it if you fainted”.
Further reading:
• Duccio Facchini’s fact sheet on Lithuania in the book “Chiusi dentro”
• Amnesty International’s monitoring and reporting work
Go to the other countries:
• Turkey • Cyprus • Greece • Bulgaria • Northern Macedonia • Serbia • Bosnia and Herzegovina • Hungary • Croatia • Albania • Italy • France • Spain • Poland
Credit
Text and layout by Altreconomia: Duccio Facchini, Luca Rondi and Martina Ferlisi. Alessandro Ferrari collaborated. Editorial coordination: Duccio Facchini.
To support Altreconomia’s independent information click here.
Images by PlaceMarks. Maps data: Google Earth, Maxar, Airbus. The opening image is the Lipa camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Who developed this project together with Altreconomia:
RiVolti aiBalcani: in order to break the silence on the “Balkan route”, denounce what is happening there and send a clear message that the vulnerable people in “the game” are no longer alone, the “RiVolti ai Balcani” network was born in the autumn of 2019. It is composed of more than 30 realities and individuals committed to the defence of people’s rights and the fundamental principles on which the Italian Constitution and European and international standards are based.
To support the activities of the network RiVolti ai Balcani click here.
PlaceMarks: is a project that uses data and satellite images to tell the story of the world and investigate its transformations with a particular focus on environmental contexts, social phenomena and humanitarian crises. Launched in 2021, it is coordinated byurban planner and researcher Federico Monica and journalist Michele Luppi.
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