Poland to temporarily suspend asylum rights amid Belarus border tensions

As part of a wider strategy to combat irregular immigration, which is being driven by the rising tensions with Belarus, Poland is scheduled to temporarily suspend the right to asylum.

Belarus is accused of facilitating the movement of migrants across their shared border by the Polish government.

The temporary suspension of the right to asylum will be one of the key points of the migration strategy, according to Prime Minister Donald Tusk on Saturday.

“I will demand this, I will demand recognition in Europe for this decision”, he told a congress held by his liberal Civic Coalition (KO) grouping, the largest member of Poland’s coalition government.

Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, Vladimir Putin, and other people smugglers are using the right to asylum in a way that goes against the law’s basic principle, according to Tusk.

Migration has been high on the agenda in Poland since 2021, when a border crisis&nbsp, resulted in thousands of asylum seekers, mainly from Afghanistan, Syria, and the Kurdish region of Iraq, attempting to enter Poland via Belarus.

It was a crisis Minsk and its ally Russia orchestrated, according to Warsaw and the European Union.

In contrast, people smugglers led refugees and migrants to believe they could enter the European Union, leading in part to promote travel to Belarus.

Before flying to Minsk, thousands of people were given tourist visas and then headed to Poland’s border.

Russia and Belarus have denied responsibility.

On October 15, the first anniversary of the coalition’s election, Tusk promised to present the migration strategy to a government meeting.

Anti-migrant rhetoric

Since taking office in December 2023, Tusk has pursued tough policies on migration.

This strategy has won broad public support, but has dismayed activists who had hoped he would abandon the previous, nationalist administration’s approach.

According to Marysia Zlonkiewicz from Grupa Granica, an NGO that assists migrants at the border, robbing the country of its sovereignty would force people to flee to countries with people smugglers.

You can’t selectively exclude or deprive people of their constitutional rights, Prime Minister Tusk claimed to be doing.

Poland has previously been accused of “pushbacks” of non-European refugees and migrants entering their country&nbsp, via the “red zone” – a 3km-wide (two-mile) strip running along the roughly 400km (249-mile) border with Belarus.

In 2021 and 2022, Al Jazeera 2022/5/22/worlds-apart-24-hours-with-two-refugees-in-poland”>spoke with migrants and refugees who claimed Polish border guards had frequently pushed them back toward Belarus.

After Poland began building a steel wall along the border, the red zone was first established in 2021, but it was finally established in 2022.