Tusk made the statement at a convention of his Civic Coalition (KO) grouping, the backbone formation of the governing coalition. Addressing the growing issue of illegal migration at the Poland-Belarus border, Tusk said the government “must regain 100% control over who enters and leaves Poland.”

He argued that the right to asylum had been used by Moscow and Minsk as a tool of hybrid war. Warsaw has accused Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko regime of collaborating with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to orchestrate a migration crisis at the EU’s external border since 2021.

The head of the Prime Minister’s Office, Jan Grabiec, later clarified the decision, saying: “If there are special agencies of the Russian state dealing with the recruitment of migrants, organizing their acquisition of visas, their flights to Moscow and subsequent transport to Belarus, and then training terrorist groups from Syria to breach the Polish border, then we are not dealing with individual cases, with the need to grant aid to individual people, but with organized actions aimed at Poland and Europe, consisting in confronting Europe en masse with migration that is not natural, but driven by Russia and Belarus.”

In 2021, over 8,000 illegal border crossings into the EU were recorded via the bloc’s eastern frontier, up from just 677 the year before.

EU migration policy

Tusk said he would demand recognition of Warsaw’s migration from Brussels, even if he “takes a beating for it.” He said he would stand firm against the provisions of the bloc’s Pact on Migration and Asylum.

"We will not respect or implement any European or EU proposals if we are certain that they threaten our security," he said.

Describing migration as “absolutely the most important matter today in Poland, Europe, and the world," Tusk accused the previous government of causing a “de facto wave of illegal migration that flooded Poland.”

"We will reduce illegal migration in Poland to a minimum," he said. "We will eradicate those practices that effectively bypassed Polish interests and compromised the security of Polish citizens and the Polish state. And we will eliminate these practices entirely."

Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said the move was a sovereign decision of the Polish state that would “benefit the whole of Europe.”

Human rights

Tusk’s announcement drew strong criticism from rights groups. A lawyer working with the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights said the move was “short-sighted, unhumanitarian, and contrary to human rights.” She also argued it was wholly unjustified in the context in which the prime minister sought to legitimize it.

“I understand that this is all justified by the issue of security and the fight against irregular migration, but on the contrary, applying for asylum is one of the legal routes to get into Poland,” Maria Poszytek was quoted as saying by the Infor legal and economic website. She added that the right to asylum is enshrined in the Polish Constitution as well as in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights.

Janina Ochojska, founder of the NGO Polish Humanitarian Action, told the Onet website Tusk was effectively suspending human rights.

“If the Prime Minister announces something like this, it means that he is also suspending the Geneva Convention, the Human Rights Convention and many other conventions and laws,” she said. “Does this mean that they will not be binding in Poland?”