Is the Croatian NGO Centre for Peace Studies (CPS) providing illegal assistance to migrants and frequently attacking the Croatian police? No, that's not true: The Centre for Peace Studies works according to Croatia's Law on Associations to provide free legal aid for asylum seekers, persons with international protection, and foreigners in matters of asylum and status. It has provided legal aid to migrants who face police expulsion orders that occasionally turn violent and are at times illegal.
The claim appeared in a video (archived here) on TikTok, published by user @nemozemo1 (archived here) on February 6, 2024, and also here (archived here), with a caption translated into English from Croatian by Lead Stories staff that read:
Incredible: Tomašević and We Can! (Možemo) rewarded an association that illegally assists illegal migrants and frequently attacks the Croatian police.
The next caption, also translated by Lead Stories staff, reads:
Bravo Senf, we need a situation like Sweden, Germany, England where people after 7 pm are not allowed to walk in fear of migrants without passports.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Tuesday, February 13 2024 at 16:41:55 CET)
The Centre for Peace Studies (CPS) (archived here) is a registered civil society organization formally established in 1997, that provides free legal aid to migrants. Its stated aims are the protection of human rights and the pursuit of social change based on the values of democracy, anti-fascism, nonviolence, solidarity, and equality. The center operates according to Croatia's Law on Associations (archived here), which governs the work of NGOs in the country.
The NGO receives funding through donations, and its Annual Report of the CPS for 2022 (archived here) shows that 77.10 percent of its donations came from EU projects, including the Open Society Foundations, Fund for Active Citizenship in Croatia, Global Fund for Children, The Dutch Council for Refugees, ENAR, ProAsyl, Civitates, AMIF, Erasmus, REC, while 3.33 percent of its annual budget comes from state and local government funds.
It has frequent interactions with migrants and the police and has filed lawsuits (archived here) in the name of refugees who were victims of a particularly brutal expulsion of illegal migrants from Croatia to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The case of a six-year-old Afghan child Madina Hussiny (archived here), who died during such an expulsion in 2017, received great public attention in Croatia. The CPS is also credited with providing evidence used by the European Court of Human Rights (archived here) to charge Croatia with specific cases of illegal expulsions and gross violations of human rights.
Zagreb's Mayor Tomislav Tomašević (whose nickname is Senf) and the Možemo! (We Can!) party referred to in this post did not (archived here) "reward" CPS since taking power in Zagreb on June 4, 2021, and the claim can be seen as a partisan effort to portray the ruling party as being soft on illegal immigration.
