The Centre for Research and Social Development IDEAS warns of increasingly frequent arbitrary decisions by the Ministry of the Interior that designate foreign nationals, including refugees and asylum seekers, as posing an ‘unacceptable security risk’. Such decisions expose people to the risk of expulsion to third countries or to countries of origin where they face persecution or serious harm, lead to arbitrary detention, or prevent them from retaining or obtaining legal status and exercising their rights in Serbia.
Over the past two years there has been a marked rise in cases where foreign nationals have been designated a ‘national security risk’ without adequate justification. Such assessments have serious consequences across a range of immigration proceedings, including the withdrawal of subsidiary protection from Syrian refugees, the rejection of asylum applications from people of Palestinian origin, and return decisions issued against Turkish nationals who face persecution in their country of origin. Russian nationals who oppose the war in Ukraine are also frequently designated security risks. Similar measures have been taken against individuals from neighbouring countries, such as the actor and writer Feđa Štukan, who was refused entry to Serbia.
These arbitrary decisions by the Ministry have led to an increasingly common pattern of entry refusals and return decisions. Local police stations also refuse to register foreign nationals under the Law on Asylum and Temporary Protection, thereby denying them access to the asylum procedure. The decisions also include the termination of residence, the rejection of asylum applications and deprivation of liberty in immigration detention centres. We recall that even the Protector of Citizens has criticised the practice of arbitrary detention in immigration detention centres, finding that it was unlawful to detain people solely because they had been assessed as posing an ‘unacceptable security risk’ when they could not be expelled and removal was the sole purpose of detention.
Particularly worrying are the cases of seriously ill foreign nationals who, because of psychosocial difficulties, commit misdemeanours rather than criminal offences and receive no adequate assistance. Instead, their asylum applications are rejected on account of behaviour caused by those very difficulties, which can only be understood as punishment for a condition over which they have no control.
IDEAS has already lodged one constitutional appeal with the Constitutional Court of Serbia over arbitrary security assessments of foreign nationals, and ordinary legal remedies are currently being exhausted in other cases. While we support the need for security assessments of all foreign nationals in Serbia, we stress that any decision determining their immigration status must provide sufficiently detailed reasons to enable them to challenge the assessment effectively.
The practice of issuing decisions that merely state that someone is an ‘unacceptable security risk’ violates the Law on General Administrative Procedure, the Law on Foreigners, the Law on Asylum and Temporary Protection, the Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights and other international human rights instruments.
