Respect for the rule of law and international conventions is beginning to have more and more more holes in the European Union in everything related to migration policy. If in October the debate (which has gone nowhere) focused on the creation of concentration camps for migrants in third countries, on Wednesday the European Commission, charged according to the European treaties with ensuring compliance, did take a step that will have legal consequences for thousands of people.
The European Commission decided this Wednesday to allow Poland, Finland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia stop accepting asylum applications of people who arrive from Russia and Belarus.
“Hybrid threats”
According to the vice-president of the European Commission (there are six vice-presidents) Henna Virkkunen, it is about confronting “hybrid threats”the term that European politicians use to talk about how regimes like the Belarusian or Russian use migration as a tool to destabilize your neighbors.
Since 2021, Belarus has organized the transfer of migrants from the Middle East to the borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, while Russia has adopted similar strategies with Finland since late 2023.
Virkkunen said: “In exceptional situations countries can limit asylum rights, but it must occur under strict conditions and with legal limits, be truly exceptional, temporary, proportionate and for clearly defined cases and always for security reasons.”
But Virkkunen did not set deadlines and could not explain why the arrival in Poland (more than 36 million inhabitants) of just over 8,000 asylum seekers in one year from Belarus poses a threat to national security polish
The regulatory change announced by the European Commission allows these five countries not applying the Geneva Convention nor EU regulations protecting refugee rights. National security is used as an argument to impose this legal limit, although the European Commission said that the principle of non-refoulement still stood.
But in practice repeals it for an unlimited time, because it did not put a time limit on the repeal. The argument, explained yesterday by the president of the European Commission, Úrsula Von der Leyen, is that Europe must prevent authoritarian regimes from using European regulations to harm the EU. It is assumed, in this argument, that receiving refugees is a harm.
Brussels also explained that this measure It will apply only to those five countriesbut community sources acknowledged that they will not be able to prevent the future others use it. For example, Spain could allege that Morocco uses migration as a political weapon to reject the asylum applications of all people who arrive in Spain through Morocco. Hungary could do the same with Serbia, Greece with Türkiye or Malta and Italy with any North African country.
The European Commission He also put money. There will be 170 million to reinforce border control measures, such as electronic surveillance equipment, mobile police detection teams, material to detect and shoot down drones arriving from beyond the borders and funds to provide better means to border guards.
The land border between Finland and Russia, of more than 1,200 kilometers, It has been completely closed for months because Finland claimed that it had detected an unusual increase in refugee arrivals. For Helsinki it constituted “a hybrid attack” and therefore he was within his right to make decisions relating to his national security.