Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk, has closed the border to asylum seekers from Belarus. He insists that he he is acting in defence of his country’s security interests against “hybrid war” tactics from that country and Russia of pushing migrants across its border.
His decision, which flies in the face of the EU’s common migration policy, is set to upset a fragile consensus among EU leaders on migration at this week’s summit which is expected to be dominated by the issue. The Polish move follows German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s decision earlier this month to introduce checks at all German border controls, a move France has since said it wants to replicate. Populist gains in elections have resulted in a significant shift towards a tougher approach among mainstream leaders.
And in her letter to leaders ahead of the summit, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the EU should consider legislating for “return hubs” in third countries, along the lines of Italy’s contentious new initiative to ship migrants off to Albania, to speed up ejections of undocumented immigrants. Previously the commission opposed the similar British Rwanda deportation scheme.
Poland is proposing temporarily to bar refugees from claiming asylum in the country after crossing the border from neighbouring Belarus, claiming that Russia and its allies are using migrants to try to destabilise the EU by stoking anti-migration sentiment and tying up resources. Tens of thousands of would-be immigrants, many from the Middle East and Africa, have attempted to cross the border into Poland via Belarus in recent years, with as many as 2,500 reported last month and more than 26,000 so far this year.
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But this is a dangerous and inadvisable path for the EU to follow. Poland’s policy of returning migrants without assessing their potential claims may well be a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. Europe’s leaders appear to be lurching to the right, unwilling to make a case for a humane and efficient system of dealing with asylum seekers.