Inside Lukavica: Bosnia’s Immigration Detention Black Box - What Our New Report Will Reveal

When someone who has gotten out of Lukavica Detention Center looks you in the eye and says, “This place is worse than prison. People sit there for years. I want you to help people inside,” it’s hard to walk away and write in neutral policy language. This new report is our attempt to honour those words by documenting what happens behind the walls of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s only official immigration detention centre,  and why it matters far beyond one building on the outskirts of East Sarajevo.

Between 2018 and 2024, at least 4,631 people,  including 115 children and 263 women, were detained in Lukavica, as Bosnia and the European Union quietly tightened detention and deportation tools. Officially, this is a well‑regulated facility with safeguards, health care and free legal aid; in practice, testimonies and monitoring show a grey zone of arbitrary detention, degrading conditions and almost no independent oversight.

What the report sets out to do

Service for Foreigners Affairs (SFA),This report brings together official statistics, legal documents and the voices of people who have lived through detention to make one simple point: Lukavica is not a bureaucratic technicality, it is a place where lives are put on hold and sometimes broken. We focus on Lukavica partly because it is the only dedicated immigration facility in Bosnia, and partly because it has become a testing ground for a wider shift toward using detention and deportation as routine tools of migration control.

The centre sits in East Sarajevo, in Republika Srpska, but is run by a state‑level agency, the Service for Foreigners Affairs (SFA), creating a jurisdictional tangle that makes it easier for everyone to pass responsibility to someone else. At the same time, EU institutions are debating a Return Regulation that would make it even easier to send people back to countries like Bosnia, while tenders quietly appear to expand Lukavica’s capacity and surveillance systems.

What the law says - and what it allows

On paper, Bosnia’s legal framework looks detailed and technical: the Law on Movement and Stay of Aliens and Asylum (2008), supported by the Law on Foreigners (2015), Law on Asylum (2016), and the Border Control Law (2025) set out who can be detained, under what grounds, and for how long. In theory, detention should be exceptional, clearly justified and limited in time, with information, legal aid and health care guaranteed.

In practice, the law leaves huge discretionary space. A person can be detained if they are seen as a “threat to public order or national security,” if there is a “fear of absconding,” if they have been readmitted under a bilateral agreement, if they have an expulsion order, or if their identity cannot be established within a few hours. With the 2025 Border Control Law explicitly framing irregular migration as a security threat on par with terrorism and organised crime, simply crossing a border irregularly becomes enough to treat someone as a danger and to lock them up.

Who holds the keys

Behind Lukavica stands a whole web of institutions, each with a piece of power and each with room to shrug. Police at various levels, together with the Intelligence and BiH Intelligence and Security Agency  and Border Police, are often the first actors: they apprehend people at borders, in reception centres like Blazuj and Lipa, or even in urban areas, and label them as “illegal” or “security‑relevant”.

The Service for Foreigners' Affairs runs Lukavica day to day: it issues detention orders, manages files, decides who can visit, and informs (or fails to inform) people about their rights. The Ministry of Security formally oversees immigration and asylum policy and handles appeals, but these appeals do not automatically stop deportations, and the ministry often presents itself as merely an appellate body with limited responsibility. The Ombudsman, who should act as a National Preventative Mechanism (NPM) under the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT) against torture, has seen access restricted - including being denied entry in 2024 in response to a complaint, a move she called unlawful.

International actors also play a key role. IOM has become a central player in managing EU donor funds for migration “management”, running reception centres, contracting private security, and quietly overseeing tender processes for Lukavica’s expansion - even while initially downplaying its role and access. NGOs are squeezed: Vasa Prava remains the only organisation with access to provide legal aid inside the centre, but its capacity has been slashed and its entry tightly controlled by SFA.

Seventeen years of warnings

Lukavica did not suddenly become a problem in the last couple of years; concerns have been raised since it opened with significant EU funding in 2009. Early visits by the Ombudsman and Amnesty International already documented people unable to access legal aid, lacking basic means to contact family or consular services, and describing their detention as “an act of torture” because of its length and conditions.

Over the years, hunger strikes, attempted riots, and legal cases at the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee have all pointed to the same issues: prolonged, opaque detention on vague security grounds, no meaningful judicial review, and a constant fear of being removed to a place where people face serious harm. More recent visits by the CPT, UN mechanisms and Human Rights Watch have repeatedly flagged inhumane conditions, lack of health care, detention of minors and lack of legal remedies - yet almost nothing has changed.

Life inside: cells, water, food, control

The picture that emerges from testimonies and monitoring visits is bleak. Cells in older sections are described as mould‑covered, poorly ventilated, with broken toilets and four people sharing a space behind barred windows and locked doors they cannot open themselves. Newer floors look better, but people report rarely being allowed to use common areas, and spending most of their time confined, often without regular outdoor access despite rules that promise at least two hours outside per day.

Access to water and basic hygiene is a recurring theme. People talk about no hot water, having to drink from the toilet, and relying on one or two cups of water a day plus an occasional bottle - far from enough for basic dignity. Food is described as nutritionally poor and repetitive, with some people saying it is so bad “even dogs would not eat it,” and basic items such as soap depend on an internal “canteen” system that many do not know about. Money taken from people on arrival can be used to “cover” their cost of detention, turning their own savings into a bill for their confinement.

Discipline is maintained not only through rules but through fear. There is an isolation cell used for people considered a threat to themselves or others, but its layout - with a sink and pole that could be used for self‑harm - makes it a dangerous place for anyone in crisis. People describe verbal abuse and physical violence by guards, over‑use of tranquilizers to quiet detainees, and informal hierarchies between detainees that authorities do little to address.

Rights on paper, silence in practice

On paper, people in immigration detention in Bosnia have a series of rights: to be informed of the reasons for their detention in a language they understand, to free legal aid, to apply for asylum, to health care, to contact consular authorities, and to receive visitors. FOI responses from SFA describe posters in multiple languages, interpreters available, and easy access to lawyers and doctors.

In reality, many people say they never received any written decisions in a language they understand, never met a lawyer unless NGOs intervened, and were asked to sign documents they could not read, under pressure and with the promise that this might help them get out. Interpreters, when present, may speak a language detainees barely understand, and interviews focus on travel routes rather than protection needs or risks on return. Appeal deadlines tick away while people are locked inside, unaware that time is running out.

Children and families

Perhaps the starkest failure is with children. Between 2018 and 2024, 115 children were detained in Lukavica, even though international bodies have repeatedly called on Bosnia to end immigration detention of minors. They are held in conditions that are harmful even for adults, with no dedicated safeguards built into the legal grounds that allow their detention.

The report highlights cases where children were separated from parents on arrival, mis‑registered, treated as adults despite being minors, or assigned “guardians” who were simply other adults travelling with them, with no assessment of their relationship or ability to protect the child. One boy attempted suicide before authorities seriously questioned his age; another was treated as an adult in criminal proceedings despite previous recognition by social services that he was a child.

A bigger system, not an isolated facility

Lukavica cannot be understood in isolation. It is fed by readmission agreements and informal arrangements with countries such as Croatia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Morocco, which make it easier to send people back and to keep them in limbo while documents are prepared. Police raids in camps and urban areas, coupled with a political narrative that connects migration to crime and terrorism, create a constant threat of being picked up and disappeared into detention.

At the same time, EU and UK discussions about “return hubs” in the Western Balkans position Bosnia, along with Serbia and Albania, as potential dumping grounds for people rejected elsewhere in Europe. Expansion works in Lukavica, financed with EU money and managed by international organisations like IOM, suggest that this is not a temporary experiment but an infrastructure being built for the long term.

Why we are publishing this now

We are publishing this report at a moment when detention frameworks are being strengthened and the walls of Lukavica are literally being raised higher. Our aim is not just to document harm but to intervene in a policy shift that risks turning Bosnia into a regional holding pen for people Europe does not want, with almost no accountability for what happens inside.

The report closes with clear calls: end the detention of children; use alternatives to detention instead of defaulting to cages; publish basic facts such as how long people are held and under which criteria; and guarantee that independent monitors, lawyers and NGOs can enter Lukavica without obstruction. None of this will undo the years people have already lost there, but it might stop Lukavica from becoming the model for a new generation of detention centres across the region.