Poland plans to suspend right to asylum in major challenge to EU
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Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has accused Belarus and Russia of abusing refugee rules to destabilise Poland and the rest of Europe.
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Read time: 2 minutes
In brief…
- Poland wants to change EU asylum seeker rules and temporarily block the right to asylum.
- Donald Tusk, the Polish Prime Minister, claims people smugglers have been taking advantage of the legally binding system, aided by Belarus and Russia.
- It raises the question as to whether the EU can still afford to have free movement within its borders, The News Agents say.
What’s the story?
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has called on the EU to let Poland temporarily suspend the right to asylum.
Under EU law, all countries in the trading bloc are obliged to offer asylum.
Tusk claims people smugglers, assisted by Belarus and Russia, have been taking advantage of this system.
“We know very well how it is used by [Belarusian president Alexander] Lukashenko, [Russian president Vladimir] Putin... by people smugglers, people traffickers, how this right to asylum is used exactly against the essence of the right to asylum”, he said.
Suspending this legal right will not come without its hurdles.
But the Polish PM says he will “demand” recognition in Europe for this decision to swerve the legal challenges that lie ahead.
It is this demand, Lewis and Emily say, which is beginning to spook the EU - the political and economic bloc which relies on solidarity amongst its members.
That raises two pivotal questions at the heart of all this - Can the EU still afford to have free movement within its borders?
And what happens when individual countries try to shut things down themselves, acting unilaterally when they are under threat?
Why is Poland seeking to suspend the right to asylum?
Why now?
The announcement has come just days ahead of an EU summit Brussels, which is set to be heavily dominated by discussions on migration.
It also comes as countries across Europe deal with high levels of migration.
And indeed, Poland is not the only European nation demanding op-outs of EU asylum law, with the Netherlands and Hungary issuing similar calls.
That’s why, Lewis notes, Poland’s move “doesn’t come in isolation”.
“Only a month ago, Germany reimposed controls on several of its frontiers to deal with the problem of irregular migration after Olaf Scholz [chancellor of Germany] had been put under huge pressure by his political opponents and by rising discontent from the German public about unhappiness on the number of people coming into Germany”, Lewis says.
In fact, most countries in the region have been calling for tougher rules to expel illegal migrants.
Recently, France, Italy, Austria, Sweden and Denmark have all tightened their border controls. But none of them go as far as challenging international law, which states that countries must give the right to seek asylum.
What’s The News Agents take?
Poland has thrown a “hand grenade right to the heart of Brussels” by asking to regain 100% control over who enters and leaves the country, says Lewis.
“It's setting Brussels, the bureaucracy of the EU and Poland, on a collision course”.
That's because 25 of the 27 EU countries are officially a part of the European Schengen zone, a wide area of free movement.
Lewis says this forms one of the core pillars of the European project.
He adds: “As soon as states start to act unilaterally, the thing that Brussels most fears, it has a chain reaction effect. You could see it in terms of the pressure it put on European solidarity when Germany said that they wanted to close some of their borders a month or so ago.”
When Germany tightened security on its land borders, you saw “furious reaction from the Austrians, the Poles and other border states”.
“The EU relies fundamentally on a sense of solidarity between its member states. There is no doubt whatsoever that that solidarity on this particular question is coming under the most fundamental strain as a result of the wider migration crisis”, Lewis adds. Tusk’s challenge to the EU also might seem somewhat odd, Emily says, given he has been such a “prominent part of the EU project” as president of the European Council and from 2019 to 2022.
By calling for a temporary shutdown of EU law, Emily says Tusk is “starting to spook” the international grouping in which he once played a crucial role.
Emily adds that this is “exactly where Russia wants the EU”.
She says: “They are highly aware that if they can create these internal divisions and start putting this question of the project cracking, then in comes Putin.
“Today it's Ukraine, many of these countries are on the front line of wherever Putin could choose to go next.”
Listen to the full discussion on today's episode of The News Agents.
