IV. EU involvement and the Migration Pact on the Ground: Bulgaria
Refugee rights advocates and legal experts across Bulgaria have criticized the growing trend toward closed facilities and detention centers as the norm rather than the exception in asylum and migration processes. Concerningly, this trend mirrors Bulgaria’s adoption of the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum and full implementation into national law, effective June 12, 2026.
Bulgaria has already garnered a reputation for failing the international and European human rights standards, and fostering a hostile and violent environment for people on the move.
The Pact’s movement toward migration adheres to a process in which Bulgaria, as a member state on the external border of Europe, is obligated to perform preliminary pre-screenings in closed facilities. These facilities will be operated by the Migration Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior to verify a third-country national’s eligibility to qualify for the submission of an asylum application. Even before the introduction of the Pact, despite the sharp decrease in irregularized entries and people seeking asylum in Bulgaria since 2016, there was a paradoxical increase in immigration detention and duration despite detention being considered an exceptional circumstance. Problematically, the Pact now standardizes this practice of immigration detention, in the use of preliminary screenings in closed facilities. The Pact’s directive power mandating preliminary screenings in closed facilities relies on Bulgaria’s reflex, which has been characterized by the systematic overuse of immigration detention, as indicated by FAR’s Valeria Ilareva. The Center for Legal Aid - Voice in Bulgaria’s advocacy specialist, Diana Todorova, foresees that the expansion of the Ministry of the Interior’s Migration Directorate and takeover of procedures from the State Agency for Refugees in mandatory preliminary screenings will result in the collapse of any remaining humanitarianism into securitization policies against refugees.
Even before the onset of the 2015 migration crisis, Bulgaria’s State Agency for Refugees functioned as a “deformed” political mutation” unable to “fulfill the proper function which [it was] originally assigned”. The insufficient capacity of SAR’s reception infrastructure in September 2013 conveniently facilitated the operationalization of the Regional Border Police Directorate and Border Police within the Ministry of the Interior to convert detention facilities into accommodation facilities. This makeshift agreement in 2013, using closed facilities for accommodation, provided the precedent to “serve the purposes of enforced deportation procedures,” enabling the impulse for administrative operation that should have been under the jurisdiction of SAR to be overtaken by the pre-existing apparatus of the Ministry of the Interior (Otova 2020, 4-5). The implementation of the European Union’s New Pact on Migration and Asylum in Bulgaria formalizes a jurisdictional shift that allows the Ministry of the Interior’s security reflexes to expand at the cost of the erosion of the State Agency for Refugees’ fragile infrastructure.
Despite the full implementation of the EU Pact for June 12, 2026, Bulgaria lags behind other member states in drafting and adopting the New Draft Law on International Protection. If this law is adopted by the Bulgarian Parliament, the civil society organization, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, holds the position that “it would fully block the national asylum system. The New Draft Law is characterized as lacking clarity and structure, and substantiating regulatory gaps in regards to key proceedings and procedures governed by the Pact. While this draft law on granting asylum remains stuck in the legislative pipeline, Bulgaria continues to expand its securitization apparatus under the Pact in the development of two preliminary screening facilities in Elhovo and Dragoman.
The implementation of the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum institutionalized the shift, expanding the Ministry of the Interior’s securitization and detention reflexes at the expense of the State Agency for Refugees’ crumbling humanitarian infrastructure. The standardization of preliminary screening in closed border facilities like Elhovo and Dragoman, the Pact codifies and dangerously exacerbates the binary between economic migrants and political refugees on Schengen’s external border. Ultimately, while the domestic legislative framework remains stalled in parliament, Bulgaria continues to expand its precarious detention regime, whereby immigration detention becomes the systematic norm.
Words by Aramayah Ocol, Policy and Media Monitoring Officer