Poland — Online Journal — Columbia Undergraduate Law Review

The Migration Crisis on the Poland-Belarus Border: How Prejudice and Nationalism Lead to Grave Violations of International and Human Rights Law

For over a year, tensions at the Poland-Belarus border have been rising at an unprecedented rate. The resulting humanitarian crisis has inspired discussion about the legal status of refugees, shedding light on Poland’s shameful reaction to the eviction of Middle Eastern refugees by Belarus president Aleksandr Lukashenko in June of 2021. Polish authorities regularly subjected thousands of fugitives camping in the village of Usnarz Gorny without food, sanitation, and heating to water cannons or tear gas, and then, ultimately, pushed them back into Belarus. [1] Such state of affairs is dictated both by the ruling party’s - PIS- historically nationalist and Catholic agenda and by public sentiment. This anti-refugee policy is not only ethically questionable, but also legally untenable. Under several international acts, notably the European Charter of Human Rights (ECHR) and the Geneva Convention, Poland has the obligation to provide Middle Eastern refugees with temporary asylum and respect their right to apply for foreign protection.

Poland’s Memory Wars: The Legal Governance of History

In January 2018, the Polish parliament adopted the 2018 Amendment to the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance, which criminalized public speech claiming that the Polish state was responsible or co-responsible for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich. [1] The controversial act details that such claims “grossly diminish the responsibility of the true perpetrators of said crimes” and render individuals liable to a fine or three-year prison sentence. [2] Although the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance was established in 1998 to prevent Holocaust denialism, an undeniably positive aspiration, the 2018 amendment has resulted in the Act becoming a coercive mechanism for distorting and censoring national history. [3] On February 8, 2021, two Polish historians, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, were convicted of violating Article 55a of the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance (2018) in their novel Dalej jest noc [Night without End] for having accused Edward Malinowski, the mayor of the Polish village Malinowo during the Second World War, of abetting the Nazis. [4] Though the Act on the Institute of National Remembrance sought to protect Holocaust remembrance and demystify Poland’s ambiguous role under the Third Reich, the proceedings of the subsequent case—Leszczyńska v. Engelking and Grabowski (2021)—reveal the inherent threat memory laws pose to historical scholarship.