State-perpetrated Crimes against Migrants? Addressing Accountability in Croatian Migration Control through Criminal Law

Abstract European states continuously adopt harmful migration control practices. While human rights litigation remains the main avenue for accountability, it often fails to hold perpetrators responsible or prevent future violations. This article addresses the under-explored potential of domestic criminal law to litigate state-perpetrated harms against migrants, focusing on pushbacks in Croatia. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative analysis of 263 testimonies, it identifies various pushback practices as crimes under Croatian law. However, practical challenges and the absence of convictions reveal the limits of this approach. Still, adopting a criminal law perspective intersects with human rights litigation and helps redirect attention from the overstated criminality of migrants to the crimes committed against them by the state. Hence, this article positions criminal law as a strategic and conceptual tool for understanding and challenging European migration control practices.