‘Help and you are a criminal’: the fight to defend refugee rights at Europe's borders

As illegal, and often violent, pushbacks of asylum seekers continue - human rights groups also report growing hostility

At the offices of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee, a human rights group in Budapest, Andras Lederer and his colleagues have a map on which they track every asylum seeker - man, woman or child - who has been physically pushed back by police from the Hungarian border and into the forests of Serbia.

The pushbacks are illegal under international law. Yet it is Lederer and his fellow human rights activists who could face arrest and a jail sentence if they went to the border to witness what is happening there.