Refugee deportations from UK to Bulgaria could violate human rights

Brussels – Legal woes ahead for Her Majesty’s government. The migration policies of the British executive led by Labour’s Keir Starmer, which include a tightening of entry into the UK, have come under the magnifying glass of numerous non-governmental organisations and law firms. According to them, the management of refugees and the practice of deporting them to Bulgaria could contravene the prohibition of torture and inhuman and degrading treatment enshrined in international conventions.

According to the official statistics provided by the London government, from July 2024 (when the Labour Party returned to power and Sir Keir Starmer took office in Downing Street) to March 2025, more than 24 thousand individuals have been expelled from the UK, including voluntary and forced repatriations. Of these, nearly seven thousand involved asylum seekers, a trend up 23 per cent from the previous 12 months. All of these people are placed aboard State flights (46 during the period) with destinations in various African, Asian, European, and South American countries.

Among the destinations on the Old Continent is Bulgaria, which the nongovernmental organisation No Name Kitchen (NNK) has been dealing with in a report published last month. From July 2024 to last March, around 200 refugees were deported from London to Sofia, under an ad hoc agreement struck by the two chancelleries (replicating similar arrangements with other countries, e.g., Germany).

The NGO speaks of a “concerning pattern of human rights violations” set up by the authorities in Sofia, due to which many of the refugees expelled from the UK end up homeless in the Balkan country. But even those who are interned in one of the overcrowded and unsanitary housing centres suffer “extreme hardship,” including inadequate food, poor sanitation, and limited access to health care.

NNK has collected several testimonies of “physical and psychological abuse,” “deliberate disinformation” about the rights refugees should enjoy, and “threats of physical violence,” documenting a series of mistreatment that, he argues, “could amount to torture” under international standards and specifically the European Convention on Human Rights.

Article 3 of the ECHR explicitly prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment, a prohibition that is allegedly systematically violated by Bulgaria (which is also legally bound by it as an EU member). Many refugees have claimed that they were forced to sign “voluntary” repatriation documents by Bulgarian authorities, under which they were then expelled from the Balkan country against their will.

A particularly gory news episode dates back to last December, when three Egyptian teenagers froze to death on the Bulgarian-Turkish border. Lawyers and NGOs accuse the authorities in Sofia of deliberately ignoring emergency calls and actively hindering efforts to provide relief to the youngsters.

So, several British law firms are helping migrants and asylum seekers challenge in the courts deportation orders issued by government agencies, to nail Her Majesty’s Executive to its international obligations.

Officially, Downing Street considers Bulgaria a safe country for repatriation, but recent surveys paint a decidedly different picture. For example, the European Council on Refugees and Exiles has pointed out how reception conditions have progressively deteriorated over the years to now stand “below basic standards.”