Internal instructions by Slovenian police on the treatment of migrants seeking international protection in Slovenia in 2018 reveal frequent unlawful migrant returns to Croatia as well as an unjustified ethnic profiling of potential asylees, Slovenian activists of Amnesty International claim.

“The documents confirm what we have been saying all along and what we have confirmed with our investigations – that our police resort to unlawful push-backs and in doing so, cooperate with Croatian institutions,” the Slovenian chapter of the international human rights watchdog said.

At the request of Amnesty International and in line with a ruling by an administrative court, Slovenian police were recently forced to publish a large portion of documents from the first half of 2018 on “contentious” police procedures in the treatment of migrants.

One of the documents, made by the police station in Novo Mesto, in charge of the border with Croatia, says that if the arrest of a migrant in the border area happens in the presence of a Croatian police officer participating in joint border controls, police should consider that the migrant has sought international protection in Croatia, Slovenian media said on Tuesday.

The Slovenian Dnevnik daily says that the police instruction is in line with a document the national police directorate sent to police stations in the spring of 2018.

The document says that Slovenian police officers participating in joint patrols along the border should hand over migrants to their Croatian colleagues also in cases when they are arrested in Slovenian territory and seek asylum before Slovenian and not Croatian police officers, says Dnevnik, which has been reporting on the matter since 2018, when the police first started employing new procedures in the treatment of migrants during the term of the then government, led by Miro Cerar.

Some of the documents which police had to publish due to the court ruling are still not available but those that are make it possible to reconstruct police instructions on migrants.

They lead to the conclusion that police procedures were not in line with conventions and laws even though police denied this on several occasions, claiming that it was not true that asylum seekers in Slovenia were sent back to Croatia and then further on to Bosnia and Herzegovina, says Dnevnik.

According to media, the documents available to Amnesty International Slovenia reveal an illegal instruction to police about the need to profile migrants according to their ethnicity and put those from Algeria and Morocco in a centre for aliens in Postojna.