Poland on Thursday, March 27, 2025, announced that it has temporarily suspended the right of migrants to apply for asylum.
This applies to migrants arriving in Poland via its border with Belarus.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced it would be happening after the controversial bill, was signed into law by President Andrzej Duda.
The bill is expected to allow Polish authorities to suspend this right for up to 60 days at a time,
Tusk had said it would be adopted “without a moment’s delay.”
On his part, Duda said the changes were needed to strengthen security on the country’s borders.
But the law has been criticized by rights groups including Human Rights Watch.
Human Rights Watch said the EU should take legal action against Poland if it was implemented.
The group urged the country’s parliament last month to reject the bill, saying it “flies in the face of Poland’s international and EU obligations.”
It says it could also “effectively completely seal off the Poland-Belarus border, where Polish authorities already engage in unlawful and abusive pushbacks”.
The government said previously the suspension would only be applied temporarily to people who pose a threat to state security.
It gave the example of “large groups of aggressive migrants trying to storm the border”.
The government says exemptions will be made for unaccompanied minors, pregnant women, the elderly or unwell.
It also exempted anyone exposed to “real risk of serious harm” by being returned and citizens of countries accused of conducting the instrumentalization of migration – like Belarus.
Tusk has dismissed criticism from human rights groups.
“Nobody is talking about violating human rights, the right to asylum,
“we are talking about not granting applications to people who illegally cross the border in groups organised by Lukashenko,” he said in October.
Since 2021, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Finland have seen a huge increase in the number of people crossing into their countries illegally from Belarus and Russia.
Polish authorities have sent thousands of troops and border guards to police its border with Belarus.
It also built a 5.5-metre-high steel fence along 186 km of the frontier where at times several thousand migrants have been left stranded.
Rights groups estimate that more than one hundred people have died on the borders between Belarus and Poland, Lithuania and Latvia since 2021.
EU eastern flank countries and the European Commission have accused the Belarusian and Russian authorities of weaponising migration.
They claim that both the Belarusian and Russian authorities use migration to create a new route into the EU to destabilize the bloc.
and then