Poland-Belarus Crisis: Human Rights Violations at the Borders of Europe

In retaliation against the sanctions imposed by the European Union for its undemocratic elections, the Belarusian regime has adopted a peculiar strategy to exert pressure over its neighbours: a so-called weaponization of migrants. Issuing facilitated tourist visas to enter Belarus and promising an easy and safe route to enter the European Union, Lukashenko’s regime has deceitfully persuaded thousands of people from their homes in the Middle East to abandon everything and to find a new life in Europe. Once in Minks, they become a tool in the hands of a dictator that has no regards for their lives. Forced to cross the border to Poland, they find a welcome in the weapons of the Polish soldiers, who violently push them back in the arms of unmerciful Belarusian guards. Pushed from one side to the other of the border, blocked in the icing forests or arbitrarily detained in Belarus or Poland, these people face severe human rights violations, including refoulement, torture and death. Yet such abuses remain unpunished, and even justified by an overarching narrative of threat and conflict, that has resulted in the depiction of the situation as an ‘hybrid warfare’ carried out by Lukashenko against Europe. In this context, asylum seekers and migrants are no more humans, but they have become mere weapons of an illiberal regime, that have to be stopped from penetrating the European Union. In the work of this Master Thesis, the crisis at the border between Poland and Belarus is addressed through a multi-level analysis of legislations and behaviours concerning migrant and refugee rights. Its objective is twofold: first, it aims at unfolding a pattern that underlies States’ commitment towards the human rights of non-citizen, strongly undermined by the primacy of sovereignty over any other principle. This is visible in the choice of wording of international and regional treaties concerning refugee rights, approved in exchange for limitations and compromises that frustrate the rights of people on the move, to the point that even the fundamental right to asylum has been interpreted as a passive right of the State to grant asylum, rather than the active right of the individual to be protected. But above all, it is evident in the attitudes adopted by States, even the virtuous European Union, towards refugees, asylum seekers and migrants alike. With migration movements perceived as problematic, the European Union has adopted a series of unlawful systems that work to exclude foreigners based on a racialised securitisation of migration, that distinguishes between nationalities and economic utility. It is in this context that the Polish-Belarusian border crisis takes place: a Fortress Europe where the fear of the ’migrant’ exacerbates a border policy focused on security and militarisation, to the detriment of all those who try to improve their existence by emigrating. Divided between upholding its own values and keeping out migrants, the European Union exposes itself to the reprisal of unscrupulous regimes that manipulate migrants’ lives in order to obtain political or economical favours. It is so that the situation enacted by Belarus is no news in the European Union, and yet it is not well-managed. Instead of finding a solution in the respect of human and refugee rights, and thus downsizing the threat perceived from migration and eliminating the danger of ‘migration weaponization’, the Fortress maintains high its walls, uncaring of the human casualties of its own actions. The second objective of this Master Thesis is indeed to overturn this narrative that poses migration as a threat to the States, and to recentre the attention on the humans whose rights are being denied at the border with the excuse of a security problem, and to expose the dangerous dialectic that justifies a silent division between worthy and unworthy people according to which human rights must be safeguarded only for the right humans.