- The Tallinn Migration Centre is organising a two-day conference and fair in the Estonian capital for residents with a migrant background.
- The Council of Europe (CoE) Commissioner for Human Rights has urged Finland to strengthen the protection of Roma and people who want to claim asylum in the country, and recommended that authorities ‘reconsider’ the country’s new migration law.
- The Prime Minister of Hungary has repeated his earlier threat to transport people who enter Hungary irregularly to Belgium.
- Prosecutors in Latvia have requested an 18-month sentence for a human rights activist who is on trial for helping people to enter the country irregularly.
- An NGO is suing the President of Poland over comments that he made in 2023 about a film that depicted the situation on the Poland-Belarus border.
- The CoE Commissioner for Human Rights has urged Poland to respect its international human rights obligations on its border with Belarus.
The Tallinn Migration Centre is organising a two-day conference and fair for residents with a migrant background. During the event, which will take place on 8-9 October in the Estonian capital, participants will have the opportunity to discuss various important issues relating to daily life, including finance and taxation, family-related services, housing and employment. They will also learn more about the services of ECRE member organisation, the Estonian Human Rights Centre. Commenting on the upcoming event, Deputy Mayor of Talinn Karl Sander Kase said: “Both Tallinn and the state as a whole have a clear interest in helping newcomers adjust to our cultural and value system. Language skills, access to the labour market, and various services are central to this”. “Preventing potential issues is always wise, and during the conference, we will listen to and share best practices that support integration,” he added.
The Council of Europe (CoE) Commissioner for Human Rights has urged Finland to strengthen the protection of Roma and people who want to claim asylum in the country, and recommended that authorities “reconsider” the country’s new migration law. Speaking after a four-day visit to the country, during which he visited the Imatra crossing point on the Finland-Russia border and the Joutseno reception centre and detention unit, Michael O’Flaherty stated that border control should not come at the expense of human rights. “I remain of the view that the recent Finnish law allowing for temporary restrictions on asylum applications, if implemented, would violate international obligations, including the prohibition of refoulement and collective expulsion and the obligation to provide effective remedies,” he said, adding: “The authorities should reconsider this law”. O’Flaherty also noted the “efforts of border guards” in preparing for the implementation of the new migration law but expressed doubts about the “feasibility of carrying out such complex assessments in compliance with human rights”.
The Prime Minister of Hungary has repeated his earlier threat to transport people who enter Hungary irregularly to Belgium. Speaking in the Hungarian parliament on 30 September, Viktor Orbán said: ”We will take the migrants who are banging on Hungary’s gates to the main square in Brussels”. Referring to the € 200 million fine which the Court of Justice of the EU imposed on Hungary in June 2024 for its longstanding failure to comply with EU migration law, and which the Hungarian government has publicly refused to pay, Orbán said: “If Brussels persists in its decision to punish us, it will get what it wants”.
Prosecutors in Latvia have requested an 18-month sentence for a human rights activist who is on trial for helping people to to enter the country irregularly. In February 2023, Ieva Raubiško, who works for the NGO I Want to Help Refugees (Gribu palīdzēt bēgļiem), was charged with “organising intentional illegal crossing of the state border for a group of people” on the Latvia-Belarus border. The charges relate to Raubiško’s efforts to support a group of Syrians who had wanted to claim asylum in Latvia but who had experienced several pushbacks from the country to Belarus. According to the human rights NGO Front Line Defenders’ case summary, Raubiško provided the five people with “practical and legal information on seeking asylum” in January 2023 after they had obtained an “interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ordering the Latvian government to refrain from deporting them and to provide basic humanitarian assistance, including food, water, clothing, medical care and temporary shelter”. Front Line Defenders has urged the Latvian authorities to drop the charges against Raubiško and to “guarantee in all circumstances that all human rights defenders in Latvia are able to carry out their human rights activities without fear of reprisals and free of restrictions”. According to the LETA news agency, Raubiško’s next hearing is scheduled for 30 October.
An NGO is suing the President of Poland over comments that he made in 2023 about a film that depicted the migration situation on the Poland-Belarus border. On 29 September, the Centre for Monitoring Racist and Xenophobic Behaviour (OMZRiK) X posted that it had “filed a lawsuit against the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, for insulting citizens of his own country by calling them ‘pigs’”. OMZRiK’s decision to sue Duda is based on an interview with Polish Television (TVP) in which the president referred to the slogan “Only pigs go the cinema” in the context of the film ‘Green Border’. The slogan is particularly controversial as it had previously been “associated with opposition to Nazi propaganda films shown in Poland during the Second World War”. The film was criticised by the then-ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, of which Duda is a former member, for insulting Polish border guards. “I am not surprised that the border guards who saw the film used the slogan ‘only pigs sit in the cinema’,” Duda said at the time. The trial is reportedly due to start in October 2025.
CoE Commissioner for Human Rights Michael O’Flaherty has urged Poland to respect its international human rights obligations on its border with Belarus. Speaking after a three-day visit to Poland, O’Flaherty stated that he considered that the “current summary return practice at the Polish-Belarusian border (…) does not allow for full respect of international human rights standards” and that “the practice of summary returns of persons across the border to Belarus, without an individual assessment, including in some cases persons who have formally requested asylum on Polish territory, exposes them to the risk of serious violations of the rights protected by the European Convention on Human Rights”. He also called on the on the Polish authorities to “invest more in creating structures for meaningful dialogue with expert civil society organisations active in providing people with legal and humanitarian assistance on the Polish-Belarusian border”, including through the “re-establishment of a consultation platform between the civil society organisations and the Border Guard” which had existed until 2015. He welcomed “the efforts of the Polish authorities to carry out search and rescue operations at the border, the initiative to embed specialised human rights coordinators in all Polish Border Guard units and at the central level, and the human rights training for members of the Border Guard”. However, he also noted that very few human rights and humanitarian NGOs had been allowed to enter the buffer zone, which was reintroduced in June and recently extended for another 90 days, and called for the establishment of “clear and standardised criteria” for the granting of entry permits by local Border Guard commanders.
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