Croatian police have continued to violate migrants’ human rights, Ombudswoman Lora Vidovic warned on Thursday in a letter to the parliamentary Committee on Human Rights and Ethnic Minority Rights, adding that the Interior Ministry has repeatedly denied her access to information on police treatment of migrants.

Vidovic said she has warned several times to date of migrants’ complaints about police violence, but has not received any information from the Interior Ministry or the State Prosecutor’s Office about the investigations that would either confirm or reject such complaints.

She said migrants had complained about their treatment at the hands of Croatian border police, saying they were “beaten with batons, forced to kneel or stand barefoot in the snow, made to walk through a police cordon while being beaten and insulted.

“In their complaints, the migrants said they had been forbidden to speak, and there are accounts showing they were robbed of their valuables, money, and mobile phones. This treatment is a potential violation of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, according to which no one may be subjected to torture, inhumane, or humiliating treatment or punishment, and it demands a detailed investigation,” the letter said.

The Ombudswoman’s Office continuously receives migrants’ complaints via civil initiatives and international organisations, on having their requests for international protection ignored, being forced into vehicles, even beaten, and returned over the border against legal procedure.

The Interior Ministry responds to requests for information by saying only the complaints are incorrect, Vidovic said, without providing the information on the number and type of investigations they had conducted.

She said that this year she was for the first time obstructed in her work as a representative of the Croatian Parliament when the Ministry of the Interior had denied her access to its database, which is the only source of information on the treatment of migrants at the hands of the police.

The Interior Ministry denied Vidovic’s claims later on Thursday, saying they were in contact with the Ombudswoman’s Office and all other institutions which have requested detailed information and explanations.

“The Ombudswoman contacted the ministry 23 times this year alone, and received detailed answers to her requests in the majority of cases, while only three requests remained unanswered, and we are working on providing the answers now,” the ministry said.

They added that the allegations that the police officers were robbing third-country nationals were never confirmed.

“Bringing up these, each time more and more drastic accounts, which regularly include sensitive and vulnerable groups such as underage children, pregnant women, children without parents’ protection and others… results in primarily creating mistrust in the police, and later, when it becomes obvious the claims are unfounded, they damage exclusively the refugees who encounter uncertainty, but also organised criminal groups on their routes,” the ministry said.

They said that the Croatian police would invest all their energy to protect the national interests and the border from illegal migrations, and provide protection to those who need it through the institutions recognised by the European Union and the international community, adding that everything else, in spite of continuous pressures, was unacceptable.

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