The Polish interior minister, Mariusz Kamiński, announced this morning the closure of the border with Belarus. The Bobrowniki border crossing will remain closed from noon today until further notice, according to a statement from the Ministry of the Interior.
The announcement comes a day after a Belarusian court sentenced Polish journalist Andrzej Poczobut to eight years in prison for reporting on Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, further straining relations between the two countries.
However, the decision of the Polish government has also been understood as another step in Warsaw's anti-immigration policy. Poland currently hosts more than 1.5 million refugees from Ukraine. However, it does not behave in the same way with migrants trying to cross the border with Belarus, a few kilometers further north, from the Middle East and Africa. For years the Warsaw government has been reinforcing its borders to prevent the passage of migrants.
A symbolic episode occurred in the summer of 2021, when thousands of people arrived in Belarus encouraged by the facilities of the Lukashenko government to obtain visas and travel to neighboring countries. The Belarusian president thus wanted to put pressure on Brussels to withdraw the sanctions imposed against Minsk. The Polish authority responded brutally against the migrants, declared a state of emergency and has since criminalized humanitarian aid to those trying to cross.
The NGOs denounce that asylum seekers who try to cross the border between Poland and Belarus continue to be hotly returned almost daily, despite the fact that this constitutes a violation of Polish and international law.
