Poland will tighten asylum rights to cut illegal migration

Poland plans to temporarily suspend asylum rights as part of a new policy that aims to reduce undocumented migration, said Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

Saturday’s announcement comes weeks after Germany extended border checks with its neighbors, and after years of a migration crisis that Poland says has been stirred up Russia and Belarus.

“One element of the strategy will be the temporary territorial suspension of the right of asylum, and I will be calling for this decision to be recognized in Europe,” Tusk said in Warsaw.

The asylum system is exploited by Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and Russian President Vladimir Putin, said Tusk, as well as “by smugglers, people smugglers, people traffickers — how the right to asylum is used exactly against the essence of the right to asylum.”

The temporary suspension will only apply to illegal attempts to cross the border from Belarus, said Jan Grabiec, head of the Chancellery of the Prime Minister.

As such, it won’t affect Ukrainians fleeing into Poland to avoid conflict at home; millions have made that journey since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Tusk said he would tighten Poland’s borders against undocumented entrants despite potential disapproval from the European Union. More details of his plan are expected next week.

“We will not respect and implement any EU ideas if we are certain that they are detrimental to our security,” Tusk said, referring to the EU migration pact set to come into force in 2026.

Tusk’s announcement was panned by Amnesty Polska, a branch of Amnesty International. “Groundless suspension of this right, even temporarily, is unacceptable and is in conflict with, among others, the Geneva Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” the group said on X.

Still, Poland’s reservations about EU migration policy add to objections voiced by other members of the bloc. In September, Hungary and the Netherlands asked be be released from the asylum agreement, while Denmark has called for a tightening of EU migration rules.

The pact, approved earlier this year after nearly a decade of turbulent negotiations, was designed to standardize the system used for processing asylum applications and accelerate the procedures.

It also established a “solidarity mechanism” that required member states, for the first time, to agree either to admit an annual quota of migrants, pay a fee for each asylum seeker they reject, or increase support for EU-wide operations for handling arrivals.

Earlier in the week, Tusk, a former president of the European Council, called on the EU to do more to tackle undocumented migration as the country deals with illegal crossings at its eastern border with Belarus.

“Poland is in a special situation,” Tusk said at a news conference in Prague on Wednesday with Czech Premier Petr Fiala. “Therefore, our position within the EU will be particularly tough.”

Poland has tried various measures to cut down on entries through its eastern border, including constructing a wall guarded by soldiers and pledging to spend billions on additional fortifications. The number of irregular crossings into Poland has dropped significantly as a result.