A spokesperson for the Office for Foreigners told Rzeczpospolita daily that the drop in international protection applications was a consequence of the government’s policy that aims to "seal" Polish borders, as well as Western European countries’ more strict approach to controls of the legal status of foreigners staying within their borders.
However, as Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (HFHR) legal expert Marta Górczyńska notes, there are many irregularities at Polish border crossing stations and many people are not even allowed to initiate asylum proceedings by filing an application, immediately receiving decisions denying them entry to Poland.
More information about the practices of the Border Guard can be obtained from the HFHR’s account of a monitoring visit at the Brest-Terespol crossing, entitled "A road to nowhere."
In recent months, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has intervened in several cases involving foreign nationals denied access to Polish asylum procedures. The ECtHR even issued an interim measures that ordered Polish authorities to receive applications for international protection from designated individuals and allow them to stay in Poland pending the review of such applications. However, as the HFHR warned, these extraordinary measures have been ignored and foreigners still forced to return to Belarus.
In June, the HFHR described the case of a Chechen national who had been denied the opportunity to submit his asylum application on 31 separate occasions and denied entry to Poland even after he secured an interim order from the ECtHR. More recently, the HFHR obtained an interim measure for three refugees from Syria. In this case as well, the foreign nationals were returned to Belarus.