Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has defended his country’s planned tough stance against migrants at the border with Belarus.
At Poland’s eastern border, it is not a case of refugees appearing spontaneously and randomly, Tusk told Wednesday’s edition of the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.
“These actions are organized in a paramilitary fashion, and we increasingly observe that in Syria and Iran, groups are being organized that are not only trained for illegal border crossings but also for behaviour that we in NATO must classify as dangerous,” Tusk said.
There is an entire system of recruitment through Russian and Belarusian diplomatic representations in several countries, Tusk further stated.
From Syria, there is evidence, he said, that criminals and people with connections to terrorist organizations are being released from prisons and brought to the Polish-Belarusian border, which is also an external border of the European Union.
Poland intends to pass a new law to temporarily suspend the right to asylum for migrants who cross the border with Belarus irregularly. The draft law is expected in a few weeks.
On Tuesday, Tusk’s centre-left government adopted a paper on migration that also provides for a temporary restriction on asylum rights.
Poland and the EU accuse Russian President Vladimir Putin and his ally Belarusian leader Alexander Lukashenko of bringing migrants from crisis regions to the EU’s external border in a deliberate manner to exert pressure on the West.
Despite the construction of a more than 5-metre-high fence and an electronic surveillance system, migrants attempt to cross the border irregularly every day. Since the beginning of the year, the border guard has registered nearly 28,000 such attempts.
Polish President Andrzej Duda criticized the Tusk government’s planned restriction of asylum rights. “This will not serve to seal the border and curb illegal migration,” Duda said in a speech before parliament.
He argued that the planned law will instead prevent representatives of the Belarusian opposition, who are persecuted by Lukashenko’s regime, from being able to seek asylum in Poland. “This is evidently a fatal mistake,” Duda criticized.
Tusk responded that there had not been a single incident of a Belarusian opposition member trying to cross the border without permission. “You couldn’t make this up if you tried,” he told the president.
