EU EASTERN BORDERS: Pushbacks from Poland Continue ― Poland Shares Details of “Shield East” Plan to Reinforce Europe’s Eastern Borders ― Finland Border Guards to Receive Additional Training Related to Implementation of Controversial New Asylum Law | European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE)

New evidence has revealed how Poland’s authorities have continued to push back migrants over its borders.
Polish officials have shared details of the “Shield East” border fortification plan: a response to alleged Russian efforts to encourage migrants to cross into Europe.
Finland’s interior minister has said that its border guards would receive training and instructions to assess the vulnerability of asylum seekers following the adoption of controversial new legislation.

New evidence from the Podlaskie Volunteer Humanitarian Emergency Service (POPH) has revealed how Poland’s authorities have continued to push back migrants over its borders. Activists from the POPH recorded footage of Polish officials carrying unconscious migrants over the border fence with Belarus. Agata Kluczewska from the POPH said that her organisation had observed the treatment of a group of about 40 people, including “more than ten minors” and “five so sick as to be unconscious or immobile on the ground”. Polish officials took one injured man to the hospital but pushed the remaining four over the fence. According to calculations from Grupa Granica, the new government has been responsible for over 4,000 pushbacks at the border since it came to power in December 2023. Activists had hoped that it would change its approach towards the border situation. Maciej Duszczyk, Deputy Minister in charge of migration, stated that “as a migration researcher, [he had] seen films with pushbacks conducted in a very non-humanitarian way. Such actions cannot take place in a democratic state that respects human rights”. The recent pushbacks seem to have taken place despite the establishment of Polish Border Guard search and rescue teams in March 2024. Katarzyna Czarnota from ECRE member organisation the Helskinski Foundation for Human Rights (HFHR) said that there was “a legitimate risk that the setting up of these search-and-rescue teams actually increases the number of migrants being “disappeared” on the Polish-Belarusian border”. Czarnota suggested that, despite being searched for, migrants were still being pushed back. She concluded that “beyond the lives potentially saved, the number of migrants detected and pushed back could actually be higher than before the setting up of the teams”. ECRE member organisations the Ocalenie Foundation, the Association for Legal Intervention, and the HFHR released a joint statement in which they commented on the continued practice. “The effects of the continuation of the (previous) PiS government’s policies by the current ruling coalition are frightening,” they wrote. “The experience of violence at the hands of Polish uniformed services was reported to us by more than 1,000 people. These are only partial numbers – many people never manage to ask for help. We also do not know what happened to many of the people we did not reach”.

Polish officials have shared details of the “Shield East” border fortification plan: a response to alleged Russian efforts to encourage migrants to cross into Europe. The plan is reportedly aimed at reinforcing anti-drone surveillance and constructing fortifications along Europe’s eastern border with the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk X posted that PLN 10 billion (€2.3 billion) would be invested in the project. In a joint statement, ECRE’s three Polish member organisations wrote: “Tusk talks about the need to protect the borders. We do not dispute this. However, the actions of the Polish forces on the border so far have nothing to do with preparations for a potential attack from the East. Under the pretext of safeguarding the security of the border, they are beating and torturing defenseless people seeking asylum, condemning them to the mortal danger of the Belarusian sistema, a borderland fully controlled by Lukashenko’s services”.

Finland has announced that its border guards would receive training and instructions to assess the vulnerability of asylum seekers once controversial new legislation is adopted. The proposed legislation would allow border guards to push back migrants without processing their asylum applications at the Finland-Russia border. Finnish Minister of the Interior Mari Rantanen stated that “border guards evaluate people every day in their work. As far as the new elements are concerned, they’d get training for the set of criteria. They’d also get support from their more experienced [colleagues], meaning they wouldn’t be alone in the situation”. When the Border Security Union requested that the determinations be made exclusively by border guards of at least lieutenant rank, Rantanen replied that this was “not particularly realistic”.

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