Poland to temporarily suspend right to asylum, PM Tusk says

While it talked tough on migrants from Middle Eastern and Asian countries, the Law and Justice-led government issued the highest number of annual residence and work permits in the whole of the EU during much of its time in office.

Tusk’s coalition has continued the policy of pushbacks and re-introduced an exclusion zone on part of the border. In July, following the death of a 21-year-old soldier who was fatally stabbed by migrants on the border, the government pushed through parliament the decriminalisation of the use of firearms by security forces in self-defence in certain circumstances.

Opinion polls suggest much of the public supports the hard-line, with 86% of respondents supporting the use of weapons in self-defence by the security services.

Indeed, Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski identified a tough migration policy by Civic Coalition as a key element in its electoral success in October last year.

“I don’t think we would have won if we hadn’t outflanked the then ruling party on the right on migration, if we hadn’t convinced the electorate that we will be as tough on physically protecting the Polish border as the previous government was, so we neutralised this issue,” Mr Sikorski told an audience at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington in September.

But rights groups have expressed concern over the new government’s migration policy. NGOs estimate more than 130 migrants have died on both sides of Belarus’ border with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia since the crisis began.

“I never saw Donald Tusk as a human rights champion, but this is a new low,” Malgorzata Szuleka, a board member of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights told the BBC.

“There is a humanitarian crisis on the border, but it is also an open migration route. We need to find a place for a rational discussion that is not so populistically driven,” she added.