Poland – “Pragmatism does not exclude humanity. Security does not exclude humanity. Pushbacks must be brought to an end,” the new Speaker of the Sejm, Szymon Hołownia, said while on a visit to Białystok, in the east of Poland, about the crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border. This was on November 24, only 11 days after he was elected as “rotational” Speaker of the Sejm, ie. for a 2-year period only, after which he will have to leave his post in favor of another member of the left-liberal anti-PiS coalition.
Szymon Hołownia is the leader of the Poland 2050 party, which is part of the Third Way alliance, one of the three alliances of parties that are set to form a new coalition government under the leadership of Donald Tusk.
His declaration concerned Poland’s pushback policy that has been in force since the beginning of the crisis created by the Lukashenko regime as a form of retaliation against EU sanctions that followed the diversion by Minsk of a Ryanair plane to arrest Belarusian dissident Roman Protasevich.
Since 2021, the Lukashenko has been luring migrants to Belarus where they are transported to the border with Poland and Lithuania, two countries that are part of Europe’s Schengen travel-free area.
The government of Mateusz Morawiecki, following Lithuania’s move, quickly responded by building a fence alongside the unprotected part of its border with Belarus. And it has enforced a pushback policy all along, with the tacit approval of the European Union, as a way of deterring would-be illegal immigrants.
Thanks to this, the border with Belarus has remained roughly under control, and most illegal immigrants traveling through Poland tend to enter Polish territory through Slovakia, not Belarus.
Poland’s incumbent defence minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, reacted very strongly to Hołownia’s announcement, saying on the following day (November 25) that “the Speaker has no idea what is going on there and what kind of threat from illegal migrants and Belarusian services our soldiers and officers face.”
According to Speaker Hołownia, the people who try to cross illegally the Belarusian-Polish border are often mothers with children and elderly people. This does not match the observations made by the Polish border guards, however, who see mainly young men. It does not match either most images broadcast by the media. It rather looks like Szymon Hołownia took his observation from Agnieszka Holland’s latest film, Green Border, which carries a very “woke” narrative that has not much to do with reality, according to its critics.
Donald Tusk, on the other hand, promised during the electoral campaign that he would better control the borders that Mateusz Morawiecki has, so the Speaker’s announcement could lead to a clash between the two men.
The experience of other European countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary, the UK, and others has shown that abandoning the pushback policies, ie. stopping to immediately send back to where they have come from the illegal immigrants caught on the spot always causes the number of attempts at crossing the border to increase very significantly. In other words, the prospect of not being pushed back on the spot is a very strong pull factor, as reckoned by the EU border agency Frontex itself in its yearly reports.
In 2020, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in the case of such pushbacks by Spain at its land borders with Morocco, in Ceuta and Melilla, where a triple border fence already stood many years before the famous Hungarian border fence erected in 2015, that pushbacks, or hot returns, did not constitute a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.