Tatjana Zdanoka, the MEP from Latvia has discussed the situation at the border with Belarus in Latvia, Lithuania and Poland with Juris Sokolovskis, a Latvian lawyer and a human rights defender.
Tatjana Zdanoka told that Poland prefers to describe the ongoing situation as a ”conflict at the external borders of the EU”. She pointed out that Poland resists to accept the conflict as a humanitarian one although, in the view of Tatjana Zdanoka, the situation has all characteristics of a humanitarian crisis. She also stressed that in this situation it is necessary to remember that the core issue is the right of a person to life which is the major human right and which some EU countries, first and foremost, Poland and Lithuania but also Latvia prefer to ignore in this case.
Tatjana Zdanoka talked to Juris Sokolovskis as a person who has been closely following the developments from the point of view of how the EU behaves in this case with regard to implementation of their human rights obligations. She puts a specific question if those asylum seekers who enter the EU throught its sourthern borders, including Greece and Italy, are any different from the ones who try the same through the eastern borders.
In Juris Sokolovskis’ view, part of the migrants have every legimiate right to be accepted as refugees. But it is possible to apply for asylum only when people are already in the EU. He states that in the developing situation at the borders with Belarus, people who have the right to ask for asylum have been pushed back and not given a single chance to apply for asylum. Juris Sokolovskis tells: “Recently the European Commission has proposed to Poland, Lithuania and Latvia that they would establish possibilities for people seeking asulym to get housed in the immediate vicinity to the their borders so that they could have their asylum application been reviewed in human conditions”.
Tatjana Zdanoka also tells that it should not be the case that the same people are treated so differently depending whether they enter the EU via its southern or eastern borders. She emphasizes that unlike Greek islands Poland has declared the area adjacent to the border closed and has limited access to it for both journalists and human rights and humanitarian workers.
Both Zdanoka and Sokolovkis express concern over the fact that there is no solid data on how many people are stuk at the borders with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia. Juris Sokolovskis points out that the avaiable data concerns only the people who have managed to cross the border. ”It is around 4200 people in Lithuania, some 3000 people in Poland and some 400 in Latvia”, he tells. He admits that in Latvia the majority of those who managed to enter the country have already left it for such a destination as Germany. He claims that nobody knows how many peopole are as of now between the borders of Belarus with the EU states.
According to Tatjana Zdanoka, the majority of her colleagues at the EP do regard this crisis to be humanitarian. She also reminds that at the time of the invasion of Iraq the Polish NATO contigent was the third biggest.
