A court has condemned the Polish state in separate sentences for sending back to Belarus two men who were injured when they tried to enter the country without documentation. Both rulings are the first judicial decisions against Poland and in favour of irregular migrants in relation to the tension that arose on the border with Belarus from 2021 due to the transit of migrants into Polish territory. These rulings also pave the way for new complaints and convictions by other victims of pushbacks – immediate expulsions without respecting the guarantees set out in international conventions – to Belarus.
The sentences were announced on Friday by the Polish press, although they were handed down on March 5 by a court in Bialystok, a city located just under 200 kilometers east of Warsaw. That court ruled in favor of an Afghan citizen and an Ethiopian citizen who were injured when trying to cross the border wall with Belarus erected by Poland. The construction of this 5.5-meter-high and 186-kilometer-long fence was officially completed on July 1, 2022, but it did not prevent dozens of people from continuing to enter Poland without documentation.
This was the case of the two migrants whose complaints have led to convictions against the Polish State. According to the court rulings, issued by the same judge, on the night of April 3, 2023, one of the complainants fractured his foot when he fell from the top of the wall and the other broke his leg when he fell from a ladder he used to overcome the barrier.
After being treated in Polish hospitals, both migrants were “driven to the border with Belarus and left there, but on the Belarusian side,” despite complaining about their injuries and one of them even requesting asylum in Poland with a brief note written on a tissue, according to the country’s press.
The rulings state that the Polish Border Guard should have treated the request as an asylum application or at least “conducted an inspection of the legality of the immigrant’s stay” and “only then forced him, if necessary, to leave the country.”
The court rulings ordered the Polish state to pay the court costs and to compensate both migrants financially with more than 50,000 euros each.
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The ruling paves the way for new complaints and convictions in favour of migrants who have been injured while trying to enter the country illegally from the Belarusian border. The court cites in its ruling five other cases involving the Border Guard for violating legal procedures when returning these people to Belarus.
Polish authorities have been the subject of harsh criticism from the Ombudsman, the United Nations and independent organisations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch (HRW) for the actions of the police, the Border Guard and the Army on the Belarusian border, for which Warsaw blames Minsk for the migration crisis.
In November 2021, HRW released a report entitled Die here or go to Poland, in which it denounced serious human rights abuses against migrants on both sides of the Belarus-Poland border, leaving many of them “in danger of death”. During the preparation of that report, the international organisation learned of the deaths of 13 migrants.
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