The use and impact of immigration detention in Bulgaria has come under the spotlight via the HEAR project, which has gathered empirical evidence from 2015 – 2016.

The project’s name, HEAR stands for Hearing Entails Awareness and Rights.

The Bulgarian non-government organisation Foundation for Access to Rights (FAR), who are Members of the IDC, conducted thirty in-depth interviews with detained immigrants in Bulgaria. They documented the evidence and studied in detail the recognised standards and case-law in light of international, European Union and national law.

The findings of these insights can be found in a Handbook, an Analytical Report and Individual Case Studies, all available at http://hear.farbg.eu/front/

More photos of the event can be seen here. 

On 27 and 29 September stakeholders in Bulgaria heard testimonies from people who had been in immigration detention at the HEAR seminar and press conference in Sofia.

Many of the recurring testimonies of people in immigration detention focus on the sense of hopelessness and the difficulty of living with the unknown:

“When I was released from detention, I felt like a child that has just crawled out of the womb of its very sick mother. Anything could have happened to the child, it could have been stillborn, but it is now out in the world and free of disease. This is how I felt when I walked out of Busmantsi.”

– Faramarz, an Iranian immigration detainee in Bulgaria

You can find more testimonies and all project HEAR outputs at the thematic website www.hear.farbg.eu.

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