“The temporary suspension of asylum applications is a response to the hybrid war declared against the entire European Union; border control and territorial security of Poland is and will be our priority, our decisions and actions will be subject to this”, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said during a party convention.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he would present Poland’s new migration strategy at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, 15 October. Tusk said that one of the programme’s points would temporarily suspend the right to asylum.

Tusk also declared that the government would not respect and implement any new EU-level solutions that could harm Poland’s security, such as the EU migration pact.

The Polish PM also referred to the matter in an X post on Sunday:

“The temporary suspension of asylum applications was introduced in May in Finland. It is a response to the hybrid war declared against the entire Union (including, above all, Poland) by the regimes in Moscow and Minsk by organising mass trafficking of people across our borders. The right to asylum is being instrumentalised in this war and has nothing to do with human rights.”

The declarations of PM Tusk were widely commented on by the media and criticised by human rights organisations such as Amnesty International.

The Austrian Kurier assesses that the announcement was unexpected in Poland, as it indicates a continuation and even deepening of the direction of the policy towards immigrants pursued by the PiS predecessors. According to commentators, this course means a dispute in Brussels.

Frankfurter Allgemeine writes that the Polish and the Czech governments have announced an EU debate on more effective protection of the Union’s external borders.

German Bild says the Polish Prime Minister’s strong stance and his warning that the hybrid war fought by Russia and its allies are aimed to destabilise Europe. The newspaper’s journalists also say that Poland has tightened its anti-immigration course, which is criticised by human rights organisations but supported by the majority of Poles.

Former Deputy Ombudsman Hanna Machinska assessed that the Prime Minister’s statement on the government’s migration strategy called “Take back control, ensure security’ ‘implies a rejection of European law”. 

The Polish Prime Minister’s propositions were criticised by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and a former KO politician and human rights activist Janina Ochojska. 

Source: PAP, Polskie Radio

Tomasz Modrzejewski

Photo: X @donaldtusk, @Straz_Graniczna