“It is difficult to assume that pushing to Belarus, at night, in the woods, is in the interest of the child”
Photo: Maciej Luczniewski/Nurphoto via Getty Images (illustrative photo)
Pursuant to the regulations, the Border Guard may place a teenage refugee in a closed, guarded prison center. He can also take him to a care and educational institution and simply leave it at the door. However, he assures that he does not do it. And he assures that he does not apply pushbacks towards children. Maciej Grześkowiak from the Office of the Ombudsman: – We know about situations in which minors were turned back to Belarus.
Read also earlier texts of the series:
To Poland through the border with Belarus More and more refugees are flowing – children. They are several -year -old citizens of African (most often) and Asian (less often). They overcome their refugee trail alone, without parents or other carers. He usually takes them many months before they reach the Polish-Belarusian border through Moscow and Minsk, through Moscow and Minsk.
According to the Border Guard data, the number of such children has increased three times during the year.
Stopping
Night, center of the forest. Polish border guards or soldiers stop a group of refugees. Among them are women and children, whole families, as well as individual people of all ages, including teenagers. The latter are trying to convince officers that they are not yet 18 years old. If they succeed, then Polish services are required to apply a separate procedure to them, different than to adults.
However, for this to happen, the refugee must be considered a minor. Sometimes this does not raise any doubts, but it also happens that to assess whether a person is 17 years old or maybe 19, you need specialist knowledge.
Lieutenant Colonel Mirosław Lis, head of the Department for Foreigners of the Podlasie Border Guard Department, explains that detainees often do not have documents with them, and even if they have them, in countries of origin it happens that children are not registered right after birth, and for example only when they are four years old. Then the data in the documents indicating the date of registration as the date of birth is not true.
– Then we send such a person to research and it often turns out that he is over eighteen – says Lt. Col. Lis. – In 2024 we examined 272 people, of which it turned out that 46 people are minors. As for the remaining 13 people, there was no need to do research – they had documents indicating the date of birth or at first glance it was obvious that they were children.
So 59 children were detained on the border last year. That's three times more than a year earlier and twice as much as in 2021, when it broke out migration crisis on the border.
We will come back to age research, while let's stop at the very limit. Because not every teenager is lucky that he will take care of the Polish system. Sometimes he has to go back to Belarus.
Pushback
Pushback's practice involves turning refugees detained on the Polish side to the country they came from. That is, to Belarus.
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