Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has defended his country’s planned tough stance against migrants at the border with Belarus.
Refugees do not appear spontaneously and randomly on Poland’s eastern border, Tusk said in Wednesday’s edition of the Gazeta Wyborcza newspaper.
“These actions are organized in a paramilitary manner, and we increasingly see groups being organized in Syria and Iran that are trained not only for illegal border crossings, but also for behavior that we in NATO must classify as dangerous,” Tusk said.
There is a whole system of recruitment through Russian and Belarusian diplomatic missions in different countries, Tusk said.
From Syria, he said, there are indications that criminals and people with ties to terrorist organizations are being released from prisons and taken to the Polish-Belarusian border, which is also an external border of the European Union.
Poland plans to adopt a new law to temporarily suspend the right to asylum for migrants who irregularly cross the border into Belarus. The bill is expected within a few weeks.
On Tuesday, Tusk’s center-left government adopted a document 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 deliberately bringing migrants from crisis areas to the EU’s external border to put pressure on the West.
Despite the construction of a five-meter-high fence and an electronic surveillance system, migrants try to cross the border illegally every day. Since the beginning of the year, the Border Patrol has recorded almost 28,000 such attempts.
Polish President Andrzej Duda criticized the Tusk government’s planned restriction of asylum rights. “This will not serve to close the border and prevent illegal migration,” Duda said in a speech to parliament.
He argued that the planned law will instead prevent representatives of the Belarusian opposition, who are being persecuted by Lukashenko’s regime, from seeking asylum in Poland. “This is clearly 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.