2024-10-12 14:35:00
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk wants to partially suspend the right to asylum for migrants who entered the country irregularly. “Today I say out loud that one element of the migration strategy will be the temporary territorial suspension of the right to asylum,” Tusk said at a meeting of his liberal-conservative citizens coalition on Saturday. In his speech he said he wanted to ask the EU to “recognise” this decision.
His government is well aware of how Belarusian head of state Alexander Lukashenko, Russian President Vladimir Putin and smugglers and human traffickers use the right to asylum. “The way this right of asylum is used contradicts the very essence of the right to asylum,” Tusk underlined. Poland will not “respect or implement any European idea” that violates the country’s security. “I’m thinking about the migration compact and the immigration context,” the prime minister said.
NATO and EU member Poland has long accused the leadership of Belarus and Moscow of coordinating the influx of migrants as part of a “hybrid” attack and of wanting to destabilize the EU by smuggling migrants across the Polish border . The accusations are rejected by Belarusian leader Lukashenko.
Along with the Czech Republic, Poland announced this week that both countries would call for “a very serious political debate on immigration” in Brussels at the next European Council meeting in mid-October. Both countries have welcomed many Ukrainian refugees.
Warsaw and Prague have long called for better protection of the EU’s external borders. At the same time they criticize the reintroduction of internal border controls, as Germany has done. In a joint statement on Wednesday, Poland and the Czech Republic called for a tightening of the EU’s migration policy and a “stricter and different version of the EU migration pact”, which is due to come into force in 2026.
#Tusk #partially #suspend #asylum #law