Alma Zadic was born in Bosnia. In the 1990s - during the war in the former Yugoslavia - she fled to Austria with her parents. In early January 2020, she was named Austria's new justice minister - the first minister in Austria with migrant roots.
Croatia has assumed the six-month rotating presidency of the EU Council -- for the first time. The youngest EU member state is having a chance to prove itself on the world stage amid serious allegations of migrant abuse at its borders.
Eight people have been arrested on human trafficking charges as part of an operation jointly carried out by police forces in Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, local media reported on Wednesday, December 18.
As 2019 draws to a close, the European border agency Frontex has released its latest reports about fluctuating trends across migrant arrivals to Europe. It found that arrivals were falling in the western and central Mediterranean and growing in the eastern Mediterranean as well as the Balkans.
The UN Migration Agency, IOM (International Organization for Migration) announced on Wednesday, December 11 that the Vucjak camp in the Una Sana Canton in Bosnia is now officially closed. 750 migrants were relocated to two facilities near the capital Sarajevo. Teams are now cleaning the Vucjak area.
Bosnia-Herzegovina has begun to move migrants from an informal camp near the country's northern border with Croatia. The site in Vucjak fell into international disrepute for its squalid living conditions.
No running water, no electricity, putrid toilets, no heating – many have long called for the Vucjak migrant camp in Bosnia to be closed. Today, authorities reportedly started transferring migrants out of the camp, after announcing its closure last week.
Two Nigerian students, who were in Croatia for a sports competition and had visas, say they were wrongly deported to Bosnia. Croatian police likely suspected them of being illegal migrants based only on their skin color.
Temperatures in northwestern Bosnia have dropped below zero, leaving hundreds of migrants in a makeshift forest camp struggling for survival. A senior human rights envoy who visited the camp on Tuesday demanded its immediate closure.
Doctors Without Borders (MSF) have warned that the conditions of migrants stuck on the border in Bosnia are worsening by the day. The organization says migrants there are forced to live in inhumane conditions and that they are reportedly subjected to violence by Croatian police when they try to cross the border.
Croatian police on Friday fired on a group of migrants trying to irregularly reach neighboring Slovenia, local officials said. One man was critically injured. Thousands of migrants trying to reach western Europe are stuck in the Balkans.
After being overwhelmed with migrants, authorities in the Bosnian city of Bihac moved hundreds of them to an old garbage dump. DW looks into key elements of what has become an escalating crisis.