Croatia builds migrant screening hubs at Dugi Dol

Near the Bosnian border, Croatia is building a migrant registration centre at Dugi Dol. A second facility is planned at Željava in Lika-Senj County, financed with EU funds (tportal.hr). Interior Minister Davor Božinović describes them as screening sites placed where migrants already cross into the EU, built to collect fingerprints and feed identity data into Eurodac, the EU's shared biometric database. The centres are Croatia's first concrete investment in the infrastructure the EU's migration overhaul requires.

That overhaul is the Migration and Asylum Pact, approved by member-state ministers in May 2024 and in force since 12 June 2026 (Council, Commission). The Pact requires pre-entry screening — identity, security and health checks — before anyone caught crossing irregularly enters asylum or return procedures (Screening Regulation). The stakes for the rest of Europe are direct. Since Croatia joined the Schengen passport-free zone in 2023, anyone passing through unregistered can reach Austria, Germany or Italy without another border check.

Registration Is the Easy Part

Božinović argues biometric registration makes identity fraud harder and helps organise return decisions (tportal.hr). The logic is straightforward: a shared asylum system fails if front-line states do not identify people consistently.

Registration, though, is only step one of three: identify someone, decide they cannot stay, remove them. The Council (where member-state ministers legislate) and Parliament reached a provisional deal on a new EU returns framework on 1 June 2026, but it is not yet in force (Council). The persistent bottleneck, acknowledged by governments across the political spectrum, is practical: origin countries refuse to take people back, travel documents go missing, and courts block removals on human-rights grounds.

The question of who oversees Dugi Dol is wide open. No public documentation details the centre's detention powers, maximum holding times, or access rules for lawyers and independent monitors. Neither the European Commission nor Frontex (the EU's border agency) has published oversight arrangements for the facility. Amnesty International warns that expanded border procedures risk rushed decisions, weak safeguards and removals before claims are properly assessed (Amnesty France).

Three Camps, One Stalemate

The divide over what follows registration splits Europe roughly three ways. Nineteen governments, led by Italy, Denmark and Austria, want return hubs in third countries, citing Italy's Albania cooperation as precedent (Adnkronos). France and Spain reject outsourcing enforcement beyond EU soil. Macron called return hubs "not our Europe" (Europe 1, Euronews). Neither Paris nor Madrid opposes tougher returns in principle. They oppose moving the process outside EU territory.

Croatia sits in a third position: building registration sites without joining the return-hub camp (EUobserver). Slovenia follows a similar path. It ended formal border controls with Croatia and Hungary in June, replacing fixed checkpoints with mobile police patrols, biometric checks and database queries (gov.si). Slovenia still enforces the border, but through data and patrols rather than barriers.

The Legal Limit Downstream

Germany shows where this approach runs into law. Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt has intensified checks at internal Schengen borders and instructed police to reject some asylum seekers at the point of entry. Berlin's Administrative Court ruled some of those rejections at the Polish border likely unlawful when people had requested protection (asyl.net). That ruling carries a lesson for Croatia: registration centres cannot become places where access to asylum disappears.

Reporting from Trieste suggests tighter Balkan-route controls may not stop crossings but push them underground, making movement costlier and more reliant on smuggler networks (Il Piccolo). Enforcement at one point on the route tends to displace crossings rather than prevent them.

Croatia is building the places where the EU's new migration system physically begins. What no country has yet demonstrated is that registering people leads to lawful, accountable removals, or that the cooperation from origin countries needed to make removal work will ever arrive. Without that proof, the new centres will capture data about people Europe cannot return.