Dozens of migrants accuse Serbian police of violence, beatings

Several dozen migrants accused Serbian police of beating and stripping them while violently pushing them back to North Macedonia, a non-governmental organisation said on Friday.

More than 70 people who arrived at the North Macedonia border last weekend claimed to have been violently pushed back by Serbian police, according to the Skopje-based Legis NGO.

It posted a video on X, formerly Twitter, showing barefoot men walking in underwear alongside a road at night.

The video was filmed by locals on the road between the village of Lojane and the border with Serbia, head of Legis Jasmin Redzepi said.

The first group of migrants, who claimed they were beaten, robbed and stripped to their underwear by Serbian police, started to arrive at Lojane on February 9 at night, Redzepi told AFP.

The migrants are from different countries, Redzepi said without elaborating on their particular countries of origin.

Contacted by AFP, neither Serbia's nor North Macedonia's police commented.

Some of the migrants pushed back from Serbia headed to Greece, some were sheltered at a border transit centre while others remained in the area with the goal of again trying to enter Serbia.

Redzepi said that the Serbian police actions were the "most inhuman and most humiliating treatment" of migrants he had witnessed in the decade that Legis has been working in the field.

"That is not the way to treat people," he added.

The migrants' final destination is neither Serbia nor North Macedonia and they committed no crime, he stressed.

And he accused the European Union of "silently" approving the police actions through its calls to strengthen border controls.

Serbia and North Macedonia lie on the so-called Balkans route, used by migrants heading towards Western Europe.

During the first 10 months of last year, nearly 100,000 migrants used the route, according to the EU's border surveillance agency Frontex.