Information Note on the Court’s case-law 57

October 2003

Tomic v. the United Kingdom (dec.) - 17837/03

Decision 14.10.2003 [Section IV]

Article 3

Expulsion

Expulsion to Croatia of an ethnic Serb who belonged to a Serb paramilitary group during the war: inadmissible

The applicant, who is an ethnic Serb from Croatia, was a member of the “Scorpions” paramilitary organisation set up by Serbs after Croatia’s decla ration of independence in 1991 and the outbreak of the war. He claims to have been beaten by the Croatian police prior to the war on account of his ethnic origin and that his wife was killed for these same reasons in 1992. He moved to Serbia in 1997 for fe ar of imprisonment and stayed there until 2001. In 2002 he entered the United Kingdom illegally and applied for asylum. The Secretary of State rejected his application on the ground that there was no real risk for the applicant in returning to Croatia. The Adjudicator granted the applicant’s appeal, finding that if returned he was likely to be charged with war crimes (which it was accepted he had not committed) and face an unfair trial; the level of discrimination he would face as a Serb would cumulatively amount to persecution. The Secretary of State appealed against this decision and the Immigration Appeal Tribunal, in line with its case-law that ethnic Serbs would not have a valid claim unless special circumstances could be shown, found that the applicant ’s circumstances and his rank as a special unit officer in a paramilitary group were not of a special nature, thus quashing the decision of the Adjudicator.

Inadmissible under Article 3: Although some reports indicated incidents of occasional violence aga inst ethnic Serbs in Croatia, they did not identify any particular ill-treatment of ex-combatants. A general amnesty for all those who had participated in the war had been issued, and the applicant had not substantiated how his return to Croatia would expo se him to a risk of ill-treatment as an ex-combatant. Likewise, the applicant had not specified particular problems of discrimination which he would be faced with on return, and the general hardship of a war-affected region to which he might be exposed wou ld not reach the level of severity required to engage Article 3. Moreover, the case concerned an expulsion to a High Contracting Party to the Convention, which has undertaken to secure the rights guaranteed under its provisions: manifestly ill-founded.

© Council of Europe/European Court of Human Rights This summary by the Registry does not bind the Court.

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