Poland halted asylum claims at the Belarus border and now wants Europe to follow its example

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — When Poland stopped registering asylum applications from migrants entering from Belarus in March 2025, authorities presented it as a temporary emergency measure to counter what they saw as a push by Russia and its ally Belarus to destabilize the country by directing tens of thousands of migrants toward the European Union. But the policy has remained in force for the past 18 months, and Poland is now urging the 27-nation bloc to allow temporary suspensions of asylum applications during episodes of “instrumentalized” mass migration elsewhere — a move that rights advocates warn could violate international law. The border between Poland and Belarus, a non-EU country that is aligned with Russia, runs for about 400 kilometers (250 miles).

Since 2021, EU authorities have accused authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko of weaponizing migration by luring people to his country to find an easier entry point into the bloc than the more dangerous routes across the Mediterranean Sea. European Commission announces new emergency framework The prospect of an EU-wide approach appeared to move closer on Sept. 16, when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced that the EU executive branch would soon propose a new “European emergency response framework” for cases of “engineered and weaponized” mass migration.

The new emergency framework would allow for “flexibility” in applying standard migration procedures under specific circumstances and for a limited period of time, she said. Von der Leyen didn’t specify what procedures would be made flexible. It’s unclear what form this proposed framework would take, whether it would need approval from the EU Parliament and EU leaders, and how soon it might come into practice.

The European Commission didn’t respond to requests from The Associated Press to list those procedures. But Poland’s deputy interior minister in charge of migration, Maciej Duszczyk, celebrated the announcement as a sign that Europe was becoming interested in what he calls “the Polish solution.” “We are happy that what we’ve been saying for a year, or a year and a half, is now becoming mainstream in the EU,” Duszczyk told the AP in an interview. He said that the July border crisis in Ceuta, when more than 70,000 people suddenly crossed from Morocco into the Spanish enclave in North Africa, “made the EU realize” t…