According to the expert on May 8, i.e. two days after the sworn in Merz as Chancellor, there were changes in the apprenticeship of asylum law in Germany.
“If we accept, and these are the declarations of the German government that Germany no longer let people who are asking for asylum on the Polish-German border, this is, in all probability, contrary to EU law,” said Buras. He stipulated that “to consider a specific case, court proceedings would be necessary.”
“If someone appealed today (Germany's decision – PAP) to the Court of Justice of the European Union, then the Tribunal would probably issue a ruling that Germany has no right to do this” – explains the expert.
Buras reminds that until May 8 German services were not ordered to “send those who want to apply for asylum from the border.”
Since October 2023, Germany has been conducting controls on the border with Poland, officially to stop illegal migration. A closer control results in an increased number of recycled to Poland.
According to Buras, “strengthened inspections were accepted by the European Commission and were not considered contrary to the law, no one questioned it.”
The interlocutor of PAP is considering the script that “someone enters Hungary from Ukraine, and then through Slovakia and Poland heads to Germany and there asylum asylum.” “Then Germany should send such a person to Hungary, not to Poland,” he explains.
“To say that, you must first take care of a given man, see documents, ask. It takes a long time. Germany has a lot of problems with it. And now they recognized +no more +” – says Buras.
“If someone asks for asylum in Poland, then Poland must check everything, carry out the procedure. Such a man then has specific rights and for months, sometimes years, he remains in the territory of the country, where he submitted the application” – continues the director of the Warsaw office of ECFR.
Buras believes that “theoretically, there may be such a situation that people who have not crossed this border have come to Germany from another country.” At the same time, it releases that “these are no thousands, but possibly individual cases.” In such a situation, Poland “should not be involved in taking care of them in any way.”
According to Buras, the whole situation “looks a bit like shifting hot potato”. The expert claims that “there is no great crisis in Germany, there is no exceptional situation that means that you should close the border.”
The director of the Warsaw ECFR office has doubts whether in connection with the change of German practices, Poland rightly decides to restore border controls. “Is it in our interest? Is it adequate to the scale of the problem? The numbers sent by Germany are very low,” he notes.
“The government himself says, and rightly so that there is no migration crisis on the border. Despite this, it introduces controls that will certainly hinder the lives of people crossing the border, including entrepreneurs. For me, this communication is completely inconsistent,” said Buras
He added that “he is not naive and understands where it comes from” – the reason is “provocation from the Polish right”.
“It was the Germans who began this political theater, because their solutions do not serve anyone. They will even worsen the situation, because they basically strengthen the political narrative serving the extreme right. Merz and Tusk enter the spiral of apparent actions,” says Buras.
The analyst expressed the hope that “the crisis would become an opportunity for Poland and Germany.”
“Two governments could sit together and think at the highest level how to organize it. There are ideas regarding cooperation with third countries or the procedures of asylum applications in countries outside the EU. Unfortunately, political dynamics, especially in Poland, does not serve to talk about cooperation. Rather, the point is to demonstrate that everyone takes actions on their own,” Buras concludes.
