Some of the volunteers from the Border Violence Monitoring Network have compiled a report documenting some of the most recent pressures on solidarity work along the Balkan Route. The report seeks to contextualise different tropes within criminalisation, including:

• Formal Criminalisation
• Policing, Repression and Informal Criminalisation
• Scrutiny
• Obstruction of Individuals and Organisations
• Arbitrary and Informal Acts of Policing
• Verbal Violence
• Physical Violence

“While this is by no means a complete inventory of the repression civil society actors and people on the move face in the region, we hope to raise awareness of this threat to freedom and solidarity. Taking this report as a starting point we will continue to document cases of repression and criminalisation in the region and urge others to do the same. This dynamic of repression, especially targeting local solidarity actors and people on the move, is of concern now more than ever because of the changes taking place in the region during Covid-19.”

The full report can be read here.

Photo: Rebecca Harms, published under CC BY-SA 2.0

Re-posted from Are You Syrious