On Suspended Rights and Walking Together
- olgacielemecka
- 5 days ago
- 11 min read
My essay on the suspension of the right to international protection in Poland was published on the Raster: Anti-racist Research network platform. Reposting it here - many thanks to the Raster collective!
Author’s Note: A version of this work was originally presented at the World Refugee Day event hosted by the Migration Institute of Finland on 18 June 2025. This text has been revised and adapted for publication.
In February 2025, Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, passed a bill (Dz.U. 2025 poz. 389) that allows to suspend the right of asylum-seekers arriving in the county via its eastern border with Belarus to apply for international protection. Without reservations, President Andrzej Duda signed it into law on March 26, 2025.
In light of the ongoing assault on the right to seek asylum, not only in Poland but across Europe and the USA, I found myself revisiting Hannah Arendt’s classic critique of the paradox that, according to her, inhabits the idea of universal human rights, and specifically the right to asylum. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, Arendt, philosopher, political theorist, and a refugee from Nazi Germany, argues that “inalienable” human rights in practice are very much alienable if stripped of the scaffolding of political belonging. Arendt viewed the right to asylum as the only human right with any potential for practical significance; however, even this is often little more than an unfulfilled promise of protection. I am reminded of her argument, when I listen to Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk defending the decision to introduce the suspension of asylum: “Nobody is talking about violating human rights, the right to asylum, we are talking about not granting applications to people who illegally cross the border in groups organised by [Alexander] Lukashenko” (BBC 2025).
In autumn 2021, the Polish Border Guard recorded a sharp rise in attempted unauthorized entries into Polish territory from neighboring Belarus. Nearly 40.000 people attempted to cross this way in 2021, compared to just 129 in the entire previous year (Polish Border Guard 2022). Polish authorities accused Belarus of deliberately rerouting migration flows toward its borders. A similar situation occurred in Latvia and Lithuania, where both national and EU officials described it as a hybrid attack (Statement 2021; European Commission 2021), with Belarus instrumentalizing (or weaponizing) migration to exert pressure on the EU in retaliation for sanctions.
In response, Poland introduced a host of measures: it imposed a state of emergency and established an exclusion zone near the border; fortified the border with razor wire, later replaced by a steel border barrier; and conducted forced expulsions, pushing people back into Belarus. As in Finland (Krivonos and Kynsilehto 2025), the narrative of hybrid threats and instrumentalized migration is used to legitimize illiberal measures and justify departures from democratic standards and international human rights obligations. The current attack on the right to seek international protection, which de facto legalizes pushbacks, is one of the starkest examples of this.
Suspending Asylum
The right to apply for international protection in Poland may be temporarily restricted based on an amendment to Article 33a(5) of the Act of June 13, 2003, on Granting Protection to Foreigners on the Territory of the Republic of Poland. The restriction can be introduced for a period of up to 60 days, with the possibility of extension for a specified period (no longer than 60 days). The bill allows to suspend accepting asylum applications if the following conditions occur, and upon the approval of the Polish Sejm:
“Instrumentalization takes place (i.e., actions by a state bordering the Republic of Poland or another entity aimed at enabling foreigners to cross the external border in violation of the law), particularly when accompanied by violence against officers defending the border;
These actions pose a serious and real threat to the security of the state or society;
The restriction is necessary to eliminate the above threats, as other measures that could prevent the threat are insufficient.”
The law does not automatically suspend the right to international protection, but it can be introduced by a decree from the Council of Ministers and extended with the approval of the Sejm. The bill was enacted immediately after President Duda signed it in March 2025 and subsequently extended twice, in May 2025 and July 2025, each time for an additional 60 days. The suspension of the right to apply for protection is limited territorially and applies to the Polish-Belarussian border. But the word “border” itself is not defined, so no one actually knows where the border ends. Does it refer only to the border strip, or does the border extend into the state territory; and if so, how far?
The Act also introduces into the legal framework a new term, “instrumentalization of migration”, and is inspired by the Finnish Act on Temporary Measures to Combat Instrumentalized Migration. The Finnish bill was a response to a rise in asylum applications from individuals crossing Finland’s border with Russia in autumn 2023. Finland accused Russia of instrumentalizing migration in retaliation for its accession to NATO, which occurred in an unprecedentedly short time following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Finland’s reputation as a beacon of democratic standards and a champion of human rights serves as a convenient excuse for Poland to adopt similar measures that, according to experts, do the exact opposite, violating, e.g., the Geneva Convention and the principle of non-refoulement. Finland’s actions help to legitimize measures that are clearly in violation of human rights standards and to present Poland as aligning with other EU countries in what Donald Tusk (2024) called a “tough but humane” approach to migration. This dynamics highlights the existing gradations of Europeanness, particularly between the “civilized” Nordics and Europe’s East, which is often perceived as more susceptible to illiberal shifts and autocratic tendencies. It reflects Poland’s semi-peripheral and conditional status within the European project, and the liberal aspiration to catch up with the West as a civilizational standard. While the Polish far right is openly racist and anti-European; centre-right and liberal discourses engage in a balancing act: seeking to assert Poland’s belonging to the West (with its presumed values such as human rights and the rule of law) while simultaneously being free to expel people on the move without any legal or humanitarian guardrails.
Assessing whether, and to what extent, instrumentalized migration occurs is not as straightforward as country officials claim (Ancite-Jepifánova 2024). But more importantly, “instrumentalization” should not affect the right of people on the move to seek protection. Yet, the rollback on asylum rights is not limited to those contexts in which instrumentalized migration is used as justification. For example, Christian Stocker, earlier this year elected as Austria’s new Chancellor, expressed a sentiment that has become increasingly widespread in Europe: that the EU needs to overhaul its asylum rules because they have lost their meaning and no longer fit the purpose (Financial Times 2025).
The Impassable Border
I reach out to Urszula Wolfram, an activist with humanitarian aid organization Podlaskie Volunteer Humanitarian Emergency Service (POPH), to ask her how the new regulations impact the on-the-ground realities of asylum-seekers. She tells me that the enormous financial and human resources that the Polish state has invested in fortifying and surveilling the Polish-Belarussian border have not made the border impassable. Instead, combined with the suspension of the right to apply for asylum, they brought back a situation similar to the early days of the crisis in 2021. People on the move no longer voluntarily present themselves to the authorities, as they did for a period of time in 2024, when asylum-seekers, often in presence of activists, could declare that they want to apply for international protection and the Polish Border Guard proceeded with the application process at the nearest station. In contrast, “now people are hiding in the forest, simply waiting for transport organized by smugglers. This further fuels the entire smuggling industry.”
I ask about the situation of persons who belong to vulnerable groups as defined by the new law. Vulnerable groups include unaccompanied minors, pregnant women, and individuals who may require special treatment, particularly due to their age or health condition. Additionally, a person deemed by the Border Guard to be at risk of serious harm in the country from which they arrived directly before entering Poland, as well as citizens of Belarus, can also be classified as vulnerable. Technically, these groups are still allowed to seek international protection.
Yet, Urszula explains that because the Polish border guards generally don’t accept applications from people who claim or declare that they belong to vulnerable groups, people on the move avoid submitting applications at all. She adds that, “There’s basically no point in trying to apply for international protection, even if you’re a minor. Because even then, the method of identifying a minor is through wrist bone scans, which don’t include any margin of error. So, a 16-year-old ends up being treated as an 18-year-old. They’re not considered a vulnerable person according to the Border Guard.”
To further illustrate, Wolfram recounts a recent case of a young man who fell from the border barrier, a 5.5 meters high steel structure built in 2022 by Poland on its border with Belarus. A military ambulance was called and it was determined that the man needed to be admitted to and examined at the hospital. Because of his injuries, the crosser should have been considered a vulnerable person. Instead, he was thrown out to Belarus, likely without ever being transferred to a medical facility.
Urszula describes the current situation of crossers being trapped in Poland in terms of a bottleneck effect: small numbers of individuals manage to cross undetected through Belarus into Poland but as they then try to cross into Germany, they are pushed back to Poland by the German police. What makes their situation even more perilous are nationalist groups that operate in western Poland, organizing so-called “citizen patrols” to try to prevent pushbacks from Germany.
If those border crossers sent back from Germany to Poland (some having crossed into Poland from Belarus and others via Latvia or Lithuania) are handed directly over to the Polish Border Guard authorities, they are automatically issued a return order. What happens next is a legal limbo. Urszula describes that: “We’ve seen such documents issued to, for example, Somalis, even though there are no deportations to Somalia. Those people are just placed in return procedures. They’re not eligible for any social assistance. In many cases they are simply left on the street, without a roof over their heads or access to medical care – even for those who clearly need it. They’re just left to fend for themselves.” In the absence of systemic support, practices regarding what to do next continuously shift. Currently, persons returned by Germany are detained in Poland in so-called “secured centers for foreigners” under conditions resembling those of a prison.
Mobility and Immobilization
The Polish case must be understood in the context of ever-expanding repressive border and migration policies in Europe: the expansion and externalization of borders and the shrinking possibilities to move to Europe, not only to seek protection but also for family reunification, tourism, work, or study. Philosopher Achille Mbembe (2017) argues that governing mobility constitutes the defining political dimension of our times. The world is divided by violently established lines that separate and segregate between who can move, cross, and settle, where and under what conditions. Those lines follow largely what W.E.B. DuBois (2018 [1903)] called the racist “color line,” a perennial system of power that creates racialized hierarchies that divide people.
I think about those lines in the context of the Polish borderlands. Those are intersecting lines where mobility, immobility, and mobilizations (of troops but also of horizontal solidarity networks) intertwine. Sometimes those lines take the shape of cracks on the screens of mobile phones and broken charging ports, smashed by the border guards to make sure crossers cannot navigate their way out. Sometimes, they look like broken bones, twisted ankles, and open wounds sustained by crossers from scaling the border fence or from beatings.
Last year, I volunteered with one of the humanitarian groups who work on the ground by delivering food, water, warm clothing, and first aid to people in transit. Often when I think about the travelers I met in the Polish border area, I am reminded of the words of my colleague, migration scholar Aija Lulle: “when people are treated like objects, life persists but in more painful ways.”[1]
During the first intervention I participated in, I was in the forest with two experienced activists. We were contacted by a group of asylum-seekers, who sent a request for assistance along with their location coordinates. But when we arrived at the location, we could not see them. It was in a dense forest, overgrown with vegetation. Then, suddenly, the tall grasses next to me moved – and it was as if the forest itself moved – and one of the women raised up and immediately dropped to the ground. Like many crossers, she had sustained an injury to her leg and could not walk.
Another time, I met a man so severely beaten by Belarusian soldiers, he lay face down on the bare ground, bruises on his body and ribs broken. His broken arm was wrapped in what looked like cling film – a makeshift protection. Despite his condition, he still decided to continue his journey. Life persists but in more painful ways…. when people continue walking despite twisted knees and ankles. When those who can no longer walk keep walking anyway.
We are told that this is a security crisis in which migration is used as a weapon of political pressure. But doesn’t the response to it resemble a kind of immobilization-as-weapon? Mobility and immobilization are deeply entangled. The Belarussian-Polish border crisis symbolically started in 2021 when a group of asylum-seekers got stranded near a village of Usnarz Gorny during a border standoff between Polish and Belarussian forces. Unable to go back or move forward, encircled by armed soldiers, they were kept for over two months on a strip of land without proper shelter. During this time, they insisted on their right to seek asylum. In October 2021, another major event in the timeline of this ongoing border crisis took place – a larger group of travelers (the media reported on hundreds or perhaps thousands of people), mostly from Iraq, approached the Kuznica border crossing to claim asylum in Poland. They were stopped with water cannons and pepper sprayed. As the crisis continues, many more are stranded in Minsk and elsewhere in Belarus, desperate and unable to reach safety.
Perhaps in this context it may seem odd to bring in the idea expressed by Rinaldo Walcott in his essay Towards Another Shape of This World. In it, Walcott writes that mobility is an inherent feature of the human species and what is “uncontainable by borders is the affective and psychic desire of our species for encountering kin and others, and this occurs through movement” (2024: 113). I remember a couple of teenage asylum-seekers whom I met during another humanitarian intervention near the Belarusian border in Poland. They hailed from two different countries, met and fell in love during their journey to Europe. They were very sweet and tender to each other. And they showed me that between the two forms of violence, one of forced mobility and the other of forced immobilization, there is also something more capacious that persists. It is the infinite capacity of us humans to walk together.
Olga Cielemecka is a feminist philosopher and postdoctoral researcher at the Karelian Institute, University of Eastern Finland, as well as a visiting researcher at the Migration Institute of Finland. Olga’s research examines how mobilities and materialities are transformed in a world increasingly shaped by environmental change. She is currently writing a book tentatively titled Unbordered: A Political Ecology of the Forest, which explores how an ancient forest on the border of Poland and Belarus is both a site of the violently imposed logic of binaries and bordering separations and a space where such divisions are unsettled.
References
Ancite-Jepifánova, A. (2024, July 14). The Concept of Migrant Instrumentalisation – Externalisation Through the Back Door? Externalizing Asylum. https://externalizingasylum.info/the-concept-of-migrant-instrumentalisation/
BBC (2025, March 27). Poland Suspends Migrants’ Right to Apply for Asylum. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8719dl587zo
Du Bois, W. E. B. (2018 [1903]). The Souls of Black Folk. Myers Education Press.
European Commission. (2021, November 8). Statement by President Von der Leyen on the Situation at the Border Between Poland and Belarus. Available at: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/STATEMENT_21_5867
Financial Times. (2025, May 25). Austrian Chancellor Says EU Asylum Rules are no Longer Fit for Purpose. https://www.ft.com/content/882deb6d-5fd9-4962-9d58-91811d213e21
Krivonos, D. & Kynsilehto, A. (2025, May 6). Vocabulary of “Instrumentalized Migration” Should Not Undermine Refugee Law and Access to Asylum. Raster.fi. Available at: https://rasterverkosto.wordpress.com/2025/05/06/vocabulary-of-instrumentalized-migration-should-not-undermine-refugee-law-and-access-to-asylum/
Mbembe, A. (2017, March 17). Scrap the Borders that Divide Africans. Mail & Guardian. Available at: https://mg.co.za/article/2017-03-17-00-scrap-the-borders-that-divide-africans/
Polish Border Guard. (2022, 12 January). Nielegalne przekroczenia granicy z Białorusią w 2021 r.[Illegal border crossings from Belarus in 2021]. Available at: https://www.strazgraniczna.pl/pl/aktualnosci/9689,Nielegalne-przekroczenia-granicy-z-Bialorusia-w-2021-r.html
Statement of the Prime Ministers of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia on the Hybrid Attack on our Borders by Belarus. (2021, August 23). Available at: https://www.gov.pl/web/nato-en/statement-of-the-prime-ministers-of-poland-lithuania-latvia-and-estonia-on-the-hybrid-attack-on-our-borders-by-belarus
Tusk, Donald. (2024, October 16). Donald Tusk: “Nasza polityka jest twarda, ale humanitarna” – wystąpienie w Sejmie. [Our policy is tough but humane – speech in the Sejm]. You Tube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pHYQK21Hdk
Walcott, R. (2024). Towards Another Shape of This World. In Borders, Human Itineraries, and All Our Relation, Duke University Press, pp. 103–132.
Endnotes
[1] Aija Lulle made this remark during her presentation Ageing Bones and Stones: What Materialities Teach Us About Humanity, at the Ageing and Migration Research Seminar at the Migration Institute of Finland in Turku on 13 May 2025.
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