Poland’s government accuses its neighbor Belarus of bringing migrants to the EU’s external border. Now the right to asylum is to be suspended. But one of Donald Tusk’s coalition partners is standing in the way.
Poland wants to temporarily suspend the right to asylum at the border with Belarus with a new law. The draft law will be available in a few weeks, said Jan Grabiec, the head of Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s office, to the broadcaster TVN24. “The law says: If someone illegally crosses the Polish border brought there by Belarusian services, if it is an element of hybrid warfare, then the Polish border guard is not obliged to accept asylum applications from these people.”
Tusk announced at a party conference of his liberal-conservative citizens’ coalition at the weekend that his country was planning to temporarily suspend the right to asylum. This had brought him criticism from the EU Commission and human rights organizations at home and abroad.
28,000 attempted border crossings from Belarus this year
Poland and the EU accuse Russia President Vladimir Putin and his ally, Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko, of organizing migrants from crisis regions to the EU’s external border in order to put pressure on the West. Despite the construction of a fence more than five meters high and an electronic surveillance system, migrants try to cross the border irregularly every day. Since the beginning of the year, the border guard has registered almost 28,000 such attempts. Germany’s eastern neighbor has around 37 million inhabitants.
The cabinet discussed a paper on migration policy in a six-hour meeting in Warsaw. It says: “If there is a risk of destabilization of the country due to the influx of migrants, it should be possible to temporarily and territorially suspend the right to accept asylum applications.”
Coalition partners argue about asylum law
After the cabinet meeting, Tusk wrote on Platform X that the government had adopted the paper in a “difficult but extremely necessary decision.” However, tensions between the coalition partners of Tusk’s center-left alliance on the asylum issue apparently emerged during the meeting.
The four ministers of the left-wing alliance Lewica expressed a different opinion, said Digitalization Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski to the Onet.pl portal. “We believe it is necessary to tighten procedures for illegal migrants, but we do not want elements such as the suspension of the right to asylum to appear in the strategy.”
Source: Stern
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