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Don’t let Belarus blackmail you – migrants at the EU’s external border should go back to their homeland. Experts say: What the EU always prides itself on falls by the wayside.
Warsaw / Brussels – There is a lot of talk in the EU about solidarity – solidarity with Poland, which is closing its border due to orchestrated migration via Belarus. The migrants who persevere in the freezing cold in the border area between Poland and Belarus are less popular.
According to experts, the incumbent federal government is supporting a procedure that violates international law. Poland is cracking down on migrants – and does not want to be watched. Freedom of the press is suspended in a three-kilometer corridor along the Belarusian border, aid organizations and EU agencies such as Frontex are not allowed in. Those migrants who make it into the country despite 15,000 Polish soldiers at the border are reportedly being pushed back to Belarus by return of post – even if they apply for asylum.
According to Polish law, this has been allowed since October: A change in the law on foreigners states, among other things, that the border guard commander may expel a foreigner immediately after an unauthorized border crossing. The Immigration Office can also reject any application for international protection if the applicant was caught immediately after crossing the border illegally.
“Pushbacks are illegal”
Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, who has made a name for himself as an opponent of migration in the EU, now sees the opportunity to establish Polish isolation as a model for all of Europe – regardless of whether there are state-controlled attempts at destabilization, as in the case of Belarus. “We must do everything we can to protect our borders on the Mediterranean Sea and in the east from immigration,” he recently told the “Bild” newspaper.
According to experts, Polish politics contradicts the values that the EU so often presents: fundamental rights. “These Polish pushbacks are illegal. EU law and the European Convention on Human Rights forbid this practice, ”said international lawyer Dana Schmalz from the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg to“ Spiegel ”. “Picking up someone in this form and pushing them back without an asylum procedure, without individual consideration of the cases, violates the ban on collective expulsion.”
Lucas Rasche from the Berlin think tank Jacques Delors Center sees “the danger that international and EU law will be broken”, as the dpa expert on EU migration and asylum policy says. He also mentions the ban on collective expulsion, which is part of the European Convention on Human Rights. According to this, the individual circumstances of a foreigner must be checked before expulsion. Rasche also refers to the non-refoulement principle.
Seehofer supports Polish course
This requirement of non-refoulement under international law describes the prohibition to push back a person seeking protection to countries “in which his life or his freedom would be threatened because of his race, religion, nationality, his membership of a certain social group or because of his political convictions”, as it says in the Geneva Refugee Convention.
International lawyer Schmalz speaks in “Spiegel” of a “dilemma of asylum policy”. “In principle, states have the right to control and restrict immigration. But this right is always in conflict with refugee protection ”. If public order is threatened, border crossings can also be temporarily closed. “However, it would undermine refugee protection if states were given the opportunity to completely deny people access to international protection.”
But this is apparently happening in Poland. Applause for the course comes from the acting Federal Minister of the Interior, Horst Seehofer. Warsaw is acting “prudently and deliberately,” said the CSU politician after the meeting with his colleague Mariusz Kaminski. When asked that the pushbacks are probably not compatible with European law, he said: “We see it differently, that this is already compatible.”
It is not the first time since the great refugee movement in 2015 and 2016 that migration is being used by other countries as a means of exerting pressure on the EU – and that EU states are reacting with severity. When Turkey unilaterally declared the border with the EU to be open in February 2020, Greece, for example, suspended the right to asylum.
Asylum law is under pressure even in the middle of Europe
In such cases, the EU faces the same challenge, says Rasche: How do you deal with a larger number of people seeking protection at the external borders? The EU still has no answer on “how to regulate, order and deal with it in accordance with international and European law”.
So does the EU throw its values overboard with every crisis? Quickly put it in a more differentiated way: the rule of law in the EU is repeatedly challenged, from the outside as in the case of Belarus, but also from within, for example when Hungary undermines the right to asylum. “How the EU as a whole and the individual member states deal with it is currently being negotiated,” says Rasche.
Most recently, he sees attempts to change the focus of the debate, says Rasche. He refers to 700,000 euros in humanitarian aid from the EU Commission and statements by former Bundestag President Wolfgang Schäuble (CDU). He advocated letting people at the border into the EU, carrying out orderly asylum procedures and repatriating those who were not politically persecuted.
It is clear to Rasche that the Belarusian approach should be condemned. Solidarity with Poland must, however, be linked to the requirement to comply with applicable EU law. But it doesn’t look like that. “What Poland is doing in this migration crisis is right and legitimate,” said Seehofer in Warsaw. dpa
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