Tribune. For a brief moment, the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border will have captured public attention. The images of three to four thousand refugees from Iraq, Syria, Yemen and elsewhere, attracted by President Lukashenko, gathered at the border on the Belarusian side in inhumane conditions, will have moved European public opinion. Learned geopolitical analyzes were formulated, repressive reactions also (sanctions, militarization of the border), but the humanitarian drama continues without having received a real political response.
Since September 2021, those who have successfully crossed the Polish-Belarusian border have found themselves in a militarized and dangerous zone, to which neither doctors, journalists nor NGOs have access. In the forest of Bialowieza, one of the last “primary” forests in Europe, men, women and children are dying of hypothermia, thirst, and lack of care.
Polish border guards ignore their asylum requests and systematically push them back to the Belarusian border. However, these practices constitute repression, which is prohibited even in times of crisis. These are violations of the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (article 33), of the European Convention on Human Rights (article 3) and its protocol 4 (article 4), the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Articles 18 and 19), all binding instruments with which compliance is required by the Union and its Member States.
Unbearable human dramas
Forced by Belarusian soldiers to cross the border, some families find themselves turned back more than ten times, or separated, causing excruciating human tragedies. On November 19, Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Dunja Mijatovic called for access to humanitarian aid, including international aid, and reiterated the urgency to put an end to systematic human rights violations humans. NGOs like Grupa Granica [Groupe frontière] or Human Rights Watch have published specific reports on the status of these violations. Coming there, the MEP Pietro Bartolo, the doctor for migrants from Lampedusa, noted “Massive violations of human rights, the rule of law, conventions”, “An atmosphere of terror” and “A humanitarian catastrophe”.
The European Commission reacted on 1er December 2021. Admittedly, she proposed (based on Article 78 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union) the Council to adopt emergency measures to enable the European states concerned to manage this crisis. However, far from reaffirming the fundamental nature of the right to asylum, the text aims to authorize the Polish, Lithuanian and Latvian authorities to apply the accelerated border procedure to all asylum requests. In fact, it makes the asylum request of these populations in need of international protection even more illusory and supports the legalization of mass expulsions.
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