SOFIA, Bulgaria—On July 5, a small crowd at the Sofia Administrative Court waited for Abdulrahman al-Khalidi to arrive for a hearing. Khalidi is a Saudi human rights activist who has been held in a Bulgarian detention center for nearly three years, since he crossed the border from Turkey in the fall of 2021 and applied for asylum. In January, Sofia’s highest court issued an unappealable ruling that his detention should end immediately, which would result in him living freely while his asylum application is processed. He started packing his bags, texted friends and family members, and prepared to leave. Then, four days later, the State Agency for Refugees issued another detention order.
“It is as if time has no meaning for them,” he wrote in a public letter. “Time that is taken away from our families, from our loved ones, from our friends, from us. Time in which we are deprived of any chance to live our own lives.”
The July hearing was related to a deportation order issued shortly after the January detention order. The deportation order, from the State Agency for National Security (DANS), came while Khalidi was appealing a rejection of his asylum claim. The deportation order was condemned by international organizations including Human Rights Watch, who warned that Khalidi would be at risk of arbitrary detention, torture, and an unfair trial if sent back to Saudi Arabia. The order claims Khalidi is a threat to national security, and the burden of proof rests on Khalidi to prove he is not.
Khalidi has three cases in court: one for his right to asylum, one to stop his deportation, and one to end his detention while the asylum procedure continues.
According to the State Agency for Refugees, Khalidi does not meet the criteria required for the granting of international protection. The agency was unable to cite specific reasons why he was identified as a threat to national security.
The morning of the deportation hearing, Khalidi was taken, handcuffed, from the Busmantsi Detention Center on the outskirts of Sofia to the courthouse in the center of the city. The judges then announced that, due to an inability to reach witnesses via video, a decision in his case would be postponed until September.
That afternoon, Khalidi started a hunger strike. He announced the decision on X, ending with “Freedom or Death,” the rallying cry of Bulgaria’s national fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire in the late 1800s.
The hunger strike wasn’t premeditated, he told me in the visiting room at Butsmansi a week later.
“After the hearing I felt very disappointed,” he said. “I couldn’t feel optimistic anymore.”
An undated photo of Khalidi. Abdulrahman al-Khalidi
Since July 5, he has been surviving on juice, coffee and water, he said—though when reached for comment, the Bulgarian refugee agency cast doubt on whether a noticeably thinner al-Khalidi had actually stopped eating.
Khalidi’s case is exceptional for the length of time he has been held in detention while waiting for an asylum claim to process, said Diana Radoslavova, cofounder of the nonprofit Center for Legal Aid-Voice in Bulgaria, which advocates for migrants’ rights. For the past eight years, the center has specifically focused on alternatives to arbitrary use of immigration and asylum detention, and Radoslavova is representing Khalidi in appeal to be released from Busmantsi while his asylum case continues.
“[It’s] literally the deprivation of freedom,” Radoslavova said of the case. “And unfortunately, arbitrary detention has been applied on a very regular basis.”
Only 2 percent of asylum seekers who entered Bulgaria in 2023 were able to take care of their asylum procedure without detention.
“The wellbeing part is unquestionable,” Radoslavova said, “but there is a very detrimental effect because of the criminalization that happens. This is a measure applied to criminals, but with fewer guarantees than prison.”
Bulgarian law sets the maximum amount of time a person can be held in a detention center for immigration cases at 18 months. For people seeking asylum, whose ability to cross borders without the required documents is a right protected under international law, the Bulgarian Law on Asylum and Refugees calls for people seeking protection to be held for “as short [a time] as possible.” But there isn’t a specific limit.
The average length of detention for asylum seekers in 2023 was 64 days. Khalidi has been held at Busmantsi for two years and 10 months. As of August, he was one of 20 asylum-seekers held at Busmantsi, according to the State Agency for Refugees’ press officer, Irina Daneva.
The Busmantsi Detention Center in Sofia on Oct. 15, 2019. Dimitar Kyosemarliev
The courts are unable to grant asylum—only the State Agency for Refugees can—so it is possible for a case to bounce endlessly between court rulings, appeals, and administrative decisions.
“That circling can go forever,” Radoslavova said.
Khalidi believes that there is collusion between the Saudi and Bulgarian governments to deport him back to Riyadh. Local human rights activists also point to the autonomous power of DANS, the state agency that labeled him a national security threat and which operates with few checks on its power.
On his initial asylum application, the State Agency for Refugees listed his nationality as Syrian, that he came to Bulgaria for economic reasons, and that the Saudi state was “democratizing.”
“Either they are really not informed and they take information from the Saudi Arabian state and their PR, or they’re informed and are turning a blind eye,” said Lina al-Hathloul, a fellow Saudi activist and the head of monitoring and advocacy at ALQST for Human Rights, a nongovernmental organization.
The nearly three years that Khalidi has been detained align with the lead-up to Bulgaria partially joining the Schengen Zone. The zone creates a borderless travel experience for countries within it, which includes most of the European Union. As Bulgaria is on the eastern edge of the EU, the entire bloc is invested, literally, in policing who enters it.
The country has a poor track record of human-rights abuses at its border that EU officials were aware of but willing to overlook for the sake of Schengen expansion, as the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network exposed earlier this year. Bulgaria received an additional 69.5 million euros in EU funds and Frontex personnel support in 2023 to pilot a border program preventing “irregular arrivals” and allowing for the swift deportation of anyone rejected through an accelerated asylum process, according to the Balkan Investigative report.
In 2024, Bulgaria’s air and sea borders were integrated into the Schengen Zone. The land border remains under scrutiny.
“For Bulgaria, there is a lot—and it will be even more—pressure now to restrict migration straight on its borders,” Radoslavova said.
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When Khalidi was a law school student in Riyadh, the Arab Spring was in full swing. Starting in 2011, he organized demonstrations (when they were still tacitly permitted) calling for a constitutional monarchy and advocating for the rights of political prisoners. As the energy of the Arab Spring waned, his activist friends started getting arrested. He suspected the secret police were building a case against him and in 2013 fled the country with his now-wife. They went to Egypt first, then Qatar, then Turkey, where he stayed for seven years and continued his advocacy work online. Their two children were born in Turkey, and still live there with Khalidi’s wife today.
In 2021, Khalidi’s national identification documents expired. Under Saudi law, the renewal process must happen in Saudi Arabia or at a Saudi consulate or embassy. (Journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who Khalidi knew from activist circles, was murdered when visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to take care of a similar task.) Turkey doesn’t recognize Saudi Arabians as refugees, and so to access the European asylum system—not Bulgaria specifically—Khalidi crossed the Bulgarian-Turkish border by foot in October 2021. He was taken to Busmantsi shortly after.
“Unfortunately, Bulgaria’s applications of the asylum system and local and European laws were extremely abusive,” he said.
But the EU asylum system that Khalidi hoped to access may make situations like his detention more legally acceptable. The bloc’s new migration pact, approved in the spring and currently being built out at the national level, allows for more instances in which detention during asylum proceedings is the standard, not an anomaly.
“The tendency of the EU policy—and I think it’s very, very clear in the new pact and the way that it’s been framed—is that it’s allowing more space for detention, more space for a very restrictive policy, more space for criminalization,” Radoslavova said.
The merging of the EU’s asylum and carceral legal systems under the broad umbrella of national security makes it easier to detain asylum seekers without clarifying what threat they pose, according to a recent report by the Platform for International Cooperation on Undocumented Migrants.
“From this perspective, immigration detention is used to pursue criminal law objectives,” the report states. “This has the effect of creating double standards in terms of access to fair trial guarantees, depending on the nationality and the migration status of the suspect, and of fostering harmful narratives which equate migrants with criminals.”
This sentiment is already prevalent in public discourse: An analysis of two of Bulgaria’s main TV stations reporting on immigration in the leadup to the country joining the Schengen Zone found that “the act of migrating is often implied to be a crime in itself” with police officers as “a force of good, in need of solidarity from the EU.”
A notable exception to these narratives mapped onto people coming from the Middle East and Northern Africa was the EU’s response to refugees fleeing Ukraine: Millions were granted legal status and freedom of movement within the bloc.
A protester holds a sign that reads “I’m afraid to live in Bulgaria” in front of the administrative court in Sofia on July 25. Dimitar Kyosemarliev
The residential blocs at Busmantsi are surrounded by solid walls topped with curls of barbed wire. Access to the outdoors is limited to a half hour a day. At night, the doors to the rooms are locked and can only be opened by a guard for detainees to use the bathroom.
Concerning conditions at Busmantsi have been detailed by outside authorities, including a 2022 U.N. Subcommittee on Prevention of Torture, which noted the poor state of accommodations, physical assaults by staff, and inadequate medical care. Khalidi has experienced all these firsthand.
Khalidi fears an unjust legal system, imprisonment, and death threats in Saudi Arabia but is exhausted by the legal system and imprisonment in Bulgaria. He worries about being able to be a good father to his children.
“The depression comes like waves,” he texted Foreign Policy recently. “I am always thinking about my family and my children.”
While he is still held at Busmantsi, Khalidi’s daily routine remains the same: He sleeps into the afternoon, works from his phone until 5 p.m., naps, wakes up for a few hours in the evening, then is in his room with the door locked until the next day. He draws on his phone and in a sketchbook brought by a visitor. And although he has little trust in what he calls the “broken mechanism” of the Bulgarian court system, he hopes to end his hunger strike outside the detention center walls.
“It will be my first meal in freedom,” he said.