Next Tuesday, January 28, five people go on trial in Poland after providing humanitarian aid to people at the Poland-Belarus border.
They face serious criminal charges and sentences of up to five years in prison, and Human Rights First knows some of them personally. Since 2021, when large numbers of people began to cross from Belarus into Poland, I have repeatedly reported on the work of volunteer activists at the border providing humanitarian and other aid to refugees.
Tens of thousands of people have attempted to cross from Belarus into Poland over the last two years. Most come from the Middle East or Africa and are often fleeing conflict. Many are women and small children.
The Belarussian government, a close ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin, has lured many of them with promises of taking them to the border of the European Union. Belarus aims to cause problems for the European Union by pushing people across its borders with Poland (and, less frequently, into Latvia and Lithuania.)
People attempting to come into Poland from Belarus – unlike those fleeing the war in Ukraine – have often been met with hostility and violence by Polish border guards and other security forces. Polish authorities also continue to target local human rights activists who give humanitarian aid to those crossing.
In 2022 Human Rights First gave the William D. Zabel Award to Grupa Granica, an informal network of Polish NGOs, activists, and locals at the border providing humanitarian, medical, and legal aid to migrants stranded in the forests there.
Next week’s trial will be held in the District Court in the city of Hajnówka in eastern Poland, and will be keenly watched throughout out and beyond Poland as a test case for what counts as criminal activity when helping vulnerable people.
In March 2022 Polish border guards detained four of those in the trial as they were helping a family of seven from Iraq and an Egyptian by providing them with transport. A few days before, one of the four, Mariusz Chyzynski and myself had driven a car filled with with medicine and other humanitarian aid into Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
The four were accused of organizing an illegal border crossing. In December 2023, another person was added to the case. According to the public prosecutor their crime is providing people with food and clothing, and transporting them “deeper into Polish territory” – literally a few miles from a forest to the closest town.
They are not the only border activists harassed for their human right works. A few days after the four were detained, Polish border guards detained a 20 year old volunteer working with Klub Inteligencji Katolickiej (Catholic Intelligentsia Club, an organization whose work I have reported on from the border.)
Other activists have also been detained. The Polish government and other governments are prosecuting humanitarian activists to intimidate them and to discourage others from providing help to asylum seekers. In 2022, Mary Lawlor, the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders (HRDs), reported to the UN General Assembly on extensive attacks across the world on HRDs working on working on the rights of refugees, migrants and asylum-seekers.
In October 2024 I reported on the case of Ieva Raubiško, an activist working at the Latvian border with Belarus. She is being prosecuted by authorities in Latvia after helping five asylum seekers obtain an interim measure from the European Court of Human Rights to prevent their deportation.
Her case in still ongoing, but in Europe and in the United States, courts have sometimes thrown out such charges. In 2019, a U.S. federal court acquitted Scott Warren of the charge of abandonment of property. He was part of a group leaving food, water, blankets and medical supplies at drop sites in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, where large numbers of migrants are known to have died from hypothermia, exposure and dehydration. He had been charged with leaving barrels of water in the desert. The court ruled that the prosecution had violated his religious freedom.
While not all prosecutions of those helping migrants are unsuccessful, courts in Europe have thrown out the charges brought on the grounds that no crime has been committed. In May 2022 in Italy, Andrea Costa, the head of the Rome non-profit migrant reception centre Baobab, and two of its employees were cleared of charges related to illegal immigration. According to press reports, the judge said the acquittals were “because the crime was non-existent”. The same month Mussie Zerai, a priest based in Trapani, Italy, was cleared of all charges relating to illegal immigration in connection with providing humanitarian aid to refugees.
In April 2021, a monk was acquitted in a German court after providing asylum in a church to a migrant. The court found that, although Abraham Sauer had unlawfully provided assistance to the man, his actions had been based on faith and conscience, and he was acquitted.
In a landmark ruling in November 2021, the European Court of Justice found that Hungarian legislation restricting the work of migrant and refugee rights activists was unlawful and must be rescinded.
But good sense does’t always prevail in these cases, and the five on trial in Poland need international scrutiny and messages of support. We will be monitoring the case and providing updates.
