On 22 September, the Department for the Execution of Judgments participated in the launch of the Croatian version of the HELP/UNHCR Course on Asylum and Human Rights. The launch was accompanied by a seminar organised by the Council of Europe HELP Programme in cooperation with the Croatian Judicial Academy.
Around 25 participants (Croatian judges from four Administrative Courts and the High Administrative Court, as well as the representative of the Ministry of Justice and Public Administration of Croatia) registered to follow this course that will last until mid-January 2024.
The course presents one of the Croatian authorities’ measures to implement the ECHR judgment in M.H. and Others v. Croatia concerning, inter alia, the detention of a family of asylum-seekers in the Tovarnik transit immigration centre for two months and 14 days. The prison-type conditions violated the minor children’s rights under Article 3. The case also concerns the authorities’ failure to consider alternatives to detention and to exercise due diligence in the asylum proceedings or inform them of the reasons in a language they understood, which violated the family’s right to liberty. In its first decision in this case, adopted at the 1475th meeting (19-21 September 2023), the Committee of Ministers invited the authorities to provide concrete information on the measures aimed at preventing delays in asylum proceedings before the administrative courts, as well as to invest additional efforts to provide statistical data on the length of asylum proceedings both before those courts and the Ministry of the Interior, while encouraging them to continue with trainings and awareness raising.
