|Published on: 26th February 2026|Categories: News|
- A new NGO monitoring report has provided the latest data on arrivals in the city of Trieste on the Italy-Slovenia border.
- The Council of Europe’s European Committee for the Prevention of Torture has published the report of its September 2024 visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
- The Court of Justice of the EU has ruled against Bulgaria’s decision to reject a young man’s asylum claim based on his loose ties to Türkiye.
- At least one person has died and several others are missing after a boat capsized on the Croatia-Bosnia and Herzegovina border.
- The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that a number of Aghan asylum applicants were unlawfully detained in Serbia and forcibly returned to Bulgaria.
A new NGO monitoring report has provided the latest data on arrivals in the city of Trieste on the Italy-Slovenia border. According to the report, which was published by ECRE member organisation the International Rescue Committee on 24 February, at least 606 people arrived in the border city’s central station in the first month of 2026 alone. Almost one-fifth of the arrivals were children. The report also highlighted significant variations in the arrivals’ intentions: approximately 60% of the interviewed families who arrived in Trieste indicated that they would remain in the city whereas only approximately 40% of the interviewed single adult men indicated that they would apply for asylum in Italy.
The Council of Europe’s European Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) has published the report of its September 2024 visit to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The report noted that conditions were “extremely poor” for people who were being detained in a prefabricated container in the restricted zone at Sarajevo Airport and the CPT requested that the BiH authorities replace it with a “suitable holding facility equipped to provide adequate conditions of detention to persons refused entry into the country”. It also described the living conditions in the Lukavica Immigration Detention Centre as “poor and carceral” and cited people who had “provided credible allegations of deliberate physical ill-treatment (severe beatings) of a detained foreign national with a severe mental disorder by security staff”. The CPT made a series of recommendations to improve the treatment of people being held at the centre.
The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) has ruled against Bulgaria’s decision to reject a young man’s asylum claim based on his loose ties to Türkiye. The case related to a Syrian teenager who applied for asylum in Bulgaria in November 2023 after having spent a month in Türkiye. However, Bulgarian officials refused to consider his application on the grounds that he had passed through a “safe third country” (STC). In its ruling on 5 February, the CJEU stated that an applicant’s connection to a country had to be “sufficient to make the applicant’s movement to that country reasonable” and that courts hearing asylum appeals must actively verify whether the conditions for using the STC rule “are actually met”. Commenting on the ruling, Iliana Savova from ECRE member organisation the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee told the Courthouse News Service that it highlighted a “longstanding flaw in national law that folds inadmissibility decisions and manifestly unfounded rejections into a single, confusing provision”. She also warned that allowing inadmissibility arguments to surface late in the asylum process risked “rewarding administrative delay” and left applicants “facing legal uncertainty about whether their claims will ever be fully examined”.
At least one person has died and several others are missing after a boat capsized on the Croatia-Bosnia and Herzegovina border. The incident occurred in the early hours of 23 February on the Una River near the town of Hrvatska Kostajnica, approximately 90 kilometers southeast of Zagreb. According to the Index online newspaper, the boat may have been carrying “seven or eight” Chinese nationals. However, this has not been confirmed by police.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has ruled that a number of Aghan asylum applicants were unlawfully detained in Serbia and forcibly returned to Bulgaria. The case related to a group of Afghan nationals who were arrested and detained in February 2017 in the town of Dimitrovgrad on the grounds of “illegal border crossing”. A Serbian court recognised their intention to seek asylum and discontinued the criminal proceedings, instead issuing them with “asylum-intention” certificates which served as temporary residence permits. Despite this, Serbian police transported the applicants to the Serbia-Bulgaria border then confiscated their documents and forced them to collectively cross into Bulgaria at night. In its ruling on 3 February, the ECtHR found that the Serbian authorities had violated articles 5(1) and 5(4) of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 4 of Protocol 4 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
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