Poland will enact a temporary ban on asylum claims to “regain control and ensure safety” in the country, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said Saturday.
Speaking at a convention in the Polish capital of Warsaw, Prime Minister Tusk said that “the state must regain 100 per cent control over who comes and enters Poland” and therefore next week he will put forward plans to enact “a temporary territorial suspension of the right to asylum”.
The move will put the neo-liberal leader at odds with Brussels, where Tusk previously served as European Council President from 2014 to 2019 during which he was a central figure in opposing the United Kingdom’s Brexit withdrawal from the EU, which was largely driven by a desire to regain sovereignty over British borders and to clamp down on mass migration.
In a stark about-face, Tusk argued Saturday that his left-liberal Civic Platform government “will not respect European ideas that undermine Poland’s security, such as the EU migration pact,” according to the Rzeczpospolita newspaper.
Earlier this year, Brussels pushed through a sweeping reform to its asylum rules, controversially including a redistribution scheme to disperse supposed asylum seekers throughout the bloc.
Member states that refuse to take in migrants from other nations will face fines of €20,000 per head. Countries like Poland and Hungary objected to the measures, arguing that they incurred great expense to protect their borders — both countries having erected border fences — and should not be punished for the failures of other EU nations to protect their borders.
“We will reduce to a minimum illegal migration in Poland, we will eradicate those practices that de facto bypassed Polish interests, which violated the security of Polish women and Poles, and the Polish state. And we will eliminate these practices to zero,” the prime minister vowed.
The prime minister argued that a temporary end to asylum is necessary to counter moves by Russia and its proxy Belarus, which Poland and other Eastern European nations have accused of using illegal migrants as a form of “hybrid warfare” to destabilise the EU.
In May, Tusk announced the implementation of a 200 meters (660 feet) wide “buffer zone” along the border between Poland and Belarus after a migrant stabbed a soldier at the border.
In 2021, several clashes broke out along the border as hundreds of illegals attempted to break into Poland, reportedly on false promises from the dictatorial Alexander Lukashenko government — a chief ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin — that they would be given safe passage to Germany after entering Poland.
Tusk remarked Saturday: “We know well how it is used by Lukashenko, Putin, by smugglers, people smugglers, human traffickers. How this right to asylum is used exactly contrary to the essence of the right to asylum.”
The Polish leader said that his government would end “the wave of illegal migration that flooded Poland” but was sure to note that the new restrictions were not intended to demonize all migrants in the country.
“The state is for people who want to work honestly in Poland, pay taxes, integrate with Polish society, and come to Poland to study at a real university. And these are the people who deserve respect,” Tusk said.
The move comes amid a broader trend among European Union countries enacting national border restrictions, including Austria, France, Germany, and Norway, among others as they continue to grapple with Islamic terrorism and other deleterious impacts of mass migration.
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