Poland

How Turkey is fuelling the Belarus-Poland migrant crisis

In the cold, damp forest lining the border between Poland and Belarus, thousands of refugees flown over from the Middle East have waiting to cross into the EU for days. Belarusian riot police are shoving them away from their gates and towards Poland, where only more forces await. The Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko has recently been in conflict with the EU, which has imposed sanctions on his regime after last year’s contested elections which many believe to have been rigged. Lukashenko is pushing refugees towards Poland to be pawns in a fight, with the backing of Putin. The refugees find themselves between a rock and a hard place: in front

Poland’s Belarusian border conflict is becoming violent

The EU’s conflict with Belarus is heating up. The simmering migrant crisis on the Polish border with Belarus exploded into a new level of intensity on Monday, as large groups of migrants marched through Belarus towards Poland before attempting to storm barbed wire fences and force their way into the Schengen zone. The Polish government responded to the violation of its border with military force. Twelve thousand troops are now being deployed along the border. When migrants managed to break a section of the fence near Kuznica on Monday, a rank of Polish soldiers filled the gap as a military helicopter flew low overhead in an attempt to deter the

Can Poland and the EU resolve the rule of law crisis?

In recent months the spectre of ‘Polexit’ has been haunting Europe. Poland and the EU have become embroiled in a dispute over the rule of law and this week the European court announced that it would be fining Poland one million euros every day until it abolished its controversial disciplinary chamber for judges, leading some to speculate that Poland could be heading towards leaving the European Union. But is Polexit really a risk? Possibly not. But one thing is clear: the crisis between Warsaw and Brussels will not build up for much longer without either a compromise or drastic consequences. Before considering the possibility of Polexit, it must first be

Why did neo-Nazis patrol the German border?

Just after midnight last Sunday, around 50 vigilantes gathered in east Germany to ‘patrol’ the country’s border with Poland. They were there to stop illegal immigrants, armed as they did so with batons, a machete, a bayonet and pepper spray. They were discovered by local police forces, but a certain nervousness from the authorities was palpable as they pleaded with residents in the eastern border regions to not take the law into their own hands. While the array of confiscated weapons suggests a well thought out plan, these ‘patrols’ are by no means coherent. The largest single group was reportedly stopped by the police in the border village of Groß Gastrose

The EU is driving Poland away

Until yesterday, it was possible to imagine that there would be a political solution to the standoff between the EU and Poland. Poland would reform the disciplinary chamber for its judges, and the EU would be satisfied that its principal grievance had been addressed. The Polish government had already promised to reform its disciplinary chamber, but it was unable to set a binding timetable, as it relies for its majority on United Poland (UP), a small, deeply anti-European party. Zbigniew Ziobro, the leader of UP, is also justice minister. The EU used to be quite adept at handling political impasses like this one, through diplomacy rather than full confrontation. But

The cold hard truth about heat pumps

When I went to Poland not long before Covid, I found a country more bitterly divided by a culture war even than we are. So I would not rule out EU leaders being right that the current government there has intruded on the independence of the judiciary for its own political ends. This is the background to recent Brussels fury that the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (supreme court) asserted the primacy of Polish law over that of the EU earlier this month. The problem never arises in the EU, of course, because there the European Court of Justice has never had an independent judiciary to be tampered with. It has aways

Merkel knows how to stop Polexit. The EU won’t listen

The EU is notoriously bad at learning from its own mistakes, mostly because it is unable to recognise these mistakes in the first place. A notable exception is austerity. There is now a consensus that it was a disaster, which blighted Europe’s economic resilience for a generation. A mistake the EU has not recognised yet is its role in Brexit: how it negotiated with David Cameron, and how it sided with the second referendum after the election, thus helping to create the political backlash that has destroyed even the faintest hope of a rapprochement with the UK. In what may be her last European Council, Angela Merkel yesterday spoke truth

The problem with the EU’s messianic treatment of Poland

Mateusz Morawiecki insists his government does not want to take Poland out of the EU. ‘Eighty-eight per cent of Poles are in favour of EU membership and half of these are our (Law and Justice party) voters,’ the Polish Prime Minister told the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week. But Morawiecki didn’t exactly seem committed to the EU on Tuesday when he locked horns in a fiery debate with the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen over Poland’s challenge to the bloc’s legal order. With Morawiecki refusing to back down and von der Leyen assuring MEPs that Brussels would move against controversial Polish legal reforms, it seemed, more than

The EU’s rule of law crisis lets Britain change the Brexit deal

Following Germany’s example, courts in Poland have rejected the supremacy of EU law. That is the principle that, if you join the EU, you give away part of your sovereignty to it and you have to do what the European Court says. I have written before about the precedent set in Germany. Both states now say that their constitution trumps EU law and the rulings of the EU courts. Legally speaking, this declaration is simply untrue – as should be known to anybody who read and signed the Lisbon Treaty, joining the EU. The United Kingdom always upheld this legal truth. If we wanted our sovereignty back, we had to

Poland’s top court has finally called the EU’s bluff

For many years, the EU has posed as a kind of overbearing imperial leviathan, which insists its law has to prevail over that of the states that make it up. Now its bluff appears to have finally been called: the Polish constitutional court in Warsaw ruled yesterday that some EU laws are in conflict with the country’s constitution. Understandably, Brussels is not happy. But what can it do about it? The background to all this is a spat between Brussels and Warsaw about whether Poland’s machinery for appointing judges to its own courts is EU-compliant. Brussels says it is not, because under it judicial impartiality cannot be guaranteed. This, it says, is contrary to EU

Donald Tusk is playing a dangerous game in dismissing Polexit

‘The British showed that the dictatorship of the Brussels bureaucracy did not suit them and turned around and left.’ That’s the verdict of the parliamentary head of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, Ryszard Terlecki, who has once again brought discussions of ‘Polexit’ to the foreground of Polish politics. Donald Tusk, Poland’s new leader of the opposition, has responded by suggesting this is party politics at work. But he is making a dangerous mistake to dismiss the prospect of a Polish exit from the EU. ‘If things go the way they are likely to go, we will have to search for drastic solutions,’ said Terlecki on Friday, citing Brexit as an example of

Fortress Europe is dreading the Afghan migrant crisis

Fortress Europe is pulling up the drawbridge. The takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban is likely to being about a new wave of refugees heading west, and so walls and fences are being hastily built around the borders of the Schengen Area. As scars inflicted by the last migrant crisis re-open, the possibility of a new influx of refugees is causing deep apprehension throughout the EU. At Usnarz Gorny, on Poland’s border with Belarus, the migrant crisis is already beginning. Twenty four Afghan migrants currently sit stranded in no man’s land between Polish and Belarusian border guards. Left without food or clean drinking water for weeks on end, their situation

Poles apart: The EU will never understand Poland

Poland was the largest state in Europe for over two centuries. It was a multi-ethnic commonwealth, a refuge for Jews, a bulwark of the counter-reformation with religious liberty and an elected monarchy. Jan III Sobieski, King of the Republic of Poland, reversed the millennium-long expansion of Islam at the gates of Vienna in 1683. If Rome was the heart of the faith, Poland was Christendom’s spear. In the 20th century, Józef Piłsudski prevented the Bolsheviks from exporting the Russian Revolution to the West. And John Paul II drove a stake through the heart of the USSR. The Poles do not believe that they need any lessons about freedom or sacrifice

Why Poland’s EU climbdown may help Law and Justice

Dare Poland stand up to the EU? The leader of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced on Saturday that the country’s controversial disciplinary chamber for judges, the subject of a long-running dispute with the bloc over the ‘rule of law’, will be disbanded. The climbdown seems at first glance to be a humiliating defeat for the Polish government in the face of pressure from Brussels. The European Court of Justice gave Poland until 16 August to disband the disciplinary chamber. Politicians in Warsaw say the chamber is a means to root out corruption but the ECJ believes it undermines the independence of the Polish judiciary. With

Hungary, Poland and the EU’s ‘diversity’ problem

It is quite something when the self-proclaimed ‘illiberal’ prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orbán, reminds Brussels of its liberal principles. As part of the ongoing row over a Hungarian law which bans the ‘depiction or promotion’ of homosexuality and gender reassignment, Orbán has argued that: ‘If we want to keep the European Union together, liberals must respect the rights of non-liberals. Unity in diversity.’ ‘Unity in diversity’ has been the official motto of the European Union for over 20 years. The idea that the continent can unite in a common political and economic framework without losing the diversity of its constituent nations underpins the very idea of a democratic union

On the run from the Nazis: a Polish family’s protracted ordeal

Writers of memoirs are often praised for their honesty — but how do we know? I found I did believe Frances Stonor Saunders for readily admitting her ambivalence towards her father, who died in 1997 of Alzheimer’s. She is ‘secretly furious’ with him for ‘not telling his story’. But when his suitcase — almost certainly containing revealing documents — is handed to her in a church car park in 2011, she baulks at opening it and puts it first in her mother’s attic (her parents divorced when she was eight), then in her uncle Peter’s, where it stays for the next ten years. Her mother had warned: ‘If you open

The EU will regret its legal onslaught against Poland

When European governments openly disobey courts, ears prick up. When two courts simultaneously contradict each other on the same day and descend into an unseemly shouting-match, all bets are off. Welcome to the mad world of Poland’s legal relations with the EU. The ruling Law and Justice Party in Poland, PiS, is cordially detested in Brussels. Its policies, which are quite popular locally, are anathema to the liberal and cosmopolitan Euro-nomenklatura. Back in 2017, PiS introduced technical changes to the terms of appointment of the Polish higher judiciary, including a disciplinary chamber with political connections armed with powers in certain cases to sanction judges.  The measures were aimed at halting corruption. But

The rule of law is breaking down in the EU

There are 27 member states in the EU. Two have now declared they are not bound by EU law. Based on the law as set out in the treaty each member state signs when it joins the EU, that means both countries are in breach of international law. The first country in breach of international law was Germany. I wrote about this last year. The German court said it wasn’t bound by EU law because the EU had no power to act on the legality of the ECB’s bond-buying programme during the pandemic. The Germans said ‘you can’t answer this question, so we will’. Crucially, the EU disagreed and the

The strangest landscapes are close to home

This pleasant volume, the author announces in the introduction, is ‘not a nature book, or even a travel book, so much as a book of fantasy: four small pilgrimages into imagination’. In its pages Nick Hunt unfurls his sleeping bag under a pink moon, breakfasts on a raw white onion and meditates both on what remains and on what we have lost. Outlandish is divided into four parts, each covering a short walk through a uniquely unusual landscape: Arctic tundra in the Cairngorms; a remnant of primeval forest straddling Poland and Belarus (‘the closest thing that Europe has to a true jungle’); the continent’s ‘only true desert’, in Spain’s south-eastern

How a Polish coal mine risks derailing the EU’s climate strategy

Cracks are appearing in the EU’s climate strategy. An international dispute over the court-ordered closure of a coal mine on the Poland-Czech Republic border has thrown divisions over how to phase out fossil fuels into sharp relief, leading to the first ever environment-related lawsuit between two EU member states. The Czech Republic has taken Poland to the European Court of Justice to oppose the extension of a licence for the Turów coal mine on Poland’s south-western border with the Czech Republic and Germany. The Czech government said that continued operations at the mine constitute a risk to the health of Czechs living nearby due to air pollution and reduced groundwater supplies. The ECJ