Bulgaria’s ‘Disappeared’ Refugees

Somalis who have waited almost a year at a reception centre while their asylum applications are processed

"The opening of a new home for illegal immigrants in Lyubimets about a month ago, shows Bulgaria has fulfilled all the Schengen criteria”, says Tsvetan Tsvetanov, the Bulgarian interior minister.

In Bulgaria, the authorities believe they are prepared for Schengen membership because the border is, they say, secure and a new refugee detention centre in Lyubimets has been opened – the second of its kind in the country.

However, I wonder if these measures are really all that Bulgaria needs to tackle its existing problems with managing illegal immigration and refugee/asylum applications and the expected increase – and pressure on the almost 200-km Bulgarian-Turkish border - if Sofia does eventually join the visa-free Schengen zone.

The newly opened detention centre, or ‘home’, in the small town of Lyubimets in southern-central Bulgaria, is one of the first things illegal immigrants who are captured at the Bulgarian-Turkish border see of Bulgaria.

The centre is one of the few modern and clean facilities that these people will experience during their years in Bulgaria. I say years, because getting a final decision on refugee and asylum status can take a year, sometimes even two.

Those caught inside the country are usually held at a much more miserable detention centre in Busmantsi, 8km east of the capital city Sofia.

Housed in one of Bulgaria’s two detention centres, the immigrants are interviewed by the authorities and told they have two options: apply for asylum or to be expelled. As you might expect, many apply for asylum.

From Lyubimets or Busmantsi detention centres, asylum applicants must be transferred to the reception centre in Sofia, which has a more liberal regime but residents often complain about conditions.

However, despite the fact that according to Bulgarian law and EU requirements, asylum seekers cannot be held in detention centres, they sometimes remain in Lyubimets or Busmantsi for months. Even the head of the state agency for refugees, Nicola Kazalov, admits there are simply not enough places for every applicant at the specialist and more liberal reception centre in Sofia.

So many asylum applicants simply declare they will live with relatives and that they can support themselves financially in order to avoid being effectively incarcerated in what they call ‘prison’. Very often these declarations of self-sufficiency are false and many end up living on the streets, without the right to work and without money, shelter, food or medical care.

A large number of applicants run away, or ‘disappear’ in the first days after being released from Busmantsi or Lyubimets, and so their applications for asylum are automatically terminated. Therefore, the official figures for terminated applications appear to suggest that many people simply leave Bulgaria after applying for refugee status.

According to the statistics on the internet site of Bulgaria’s state agency for refugees, of a total of 19,327 asylum applications from 1993 to 2010, 5,758 were rejected and another 6,975 were suspended – these people are missing from the system and no one knows where they are now.


In just the first four months of 2011, suspended (terminated) proceedings accounted for 107 of 337 applications for asylum in Bulgaria. Another 107 people were rejected outright, and a significant proportion of them will now become trapped in a vicious circle of reapplying and/or going into hiding or running to an EU country, as even the public authorities confess.

In 2010, 202 applications were terminated and 368 were rejected of a total of 1,025. During 2009, of a total 853 applications 380 were rejected and 91 have ‘disappeared’ – that is, their applications have been terminated but no one knows where they are now.

That means that roughly 50 per cent of asylum seekers who have applied are either missing or have had their applications turned down in the past two years.

If Sofia is having trouble tracing all its one-time refugees and asylum seekers now, no matter the outcome of their applications, it seems likely that things are set to get worse once immigration levels rise as is expected post-Schengen.

In neighbouring Greece, a long-time EU and Schengen zone member, the police and border security services estimate around 36,000 people attempt to cross illegally into the country via the Greek-Turkish border. Sofia’s annual figure of average 1,000 immigrants is puny by comparison.

If there are even more refugees, as many expect, once Bulgaria joins Schengen, how will the authorities cope?
Juliana Koleva is journalist from Sofia who is participating in the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

She will be writing regular updates on her investigation into how Sofia is dealing with a relatively new phenomenon: refugees seeking asylum in Bulgaria.