Tag Archives: Poland

UN refugee agency presses Poland to help migrants on Belarus border

WARSAW (Reuters) -The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR and rights groups urged Poland on Tuesday to offer medical and legal support and shelter to migrants camping on the border with Belarus, a day after Warsaw said it would build a fence to prevent migrants crossing.

Poland and fellow EU states Lithuania and Latvia have reported sharp increases in migrants from countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan trying to cross their frontiers. The EU says Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko is waging “hybrid warfare” with migrants to exert pressure on the bloc.

“While we acknowledge the challenges posed by recent arrivals to Poland, we call on the Polish authorities to provide access to territory, immediate medical assistance, legal advice, and psychosocial support to these people,” said Christine Goyer, the UNHCR’s representative in Poland.

On Monday, Polish Defense Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said that a new 2.5-metre-(8.2-foot)-high solid fence would be built along the border with Belarus.

“States have the legitimate right to manage their borders in accordance with international law. However, they must also respect human rights, including the right to seek asylum,” the UNHCR said in a statement.

Poland’s Foreign Ministry said it fully applies provisions of national and international law with respect to asylum.

“Poland fully respects the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and complies with its provisions in the current situation. At the same time, we expect that Belarus, as a party to the Convention, to fulfill its obligations and will provide appropriate care to people in its territory,” a ministry statement said.

The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights said on Tuesday it has requested the European Court of Human Rights take temporary measures to ensure Poland ensures the migrants’ safety, and offer them food, water and shelter at a refugee center.

The Polish Human Rights Ombudsman said Poland’s Border Guard had violated the Geneva Convention by not accepting verbal declarations from some of the migrants that they wanted to apply for international protection in Poland.

(Reporting by Joanna Plucinska; Additional reporting by Anna Koper; Editing by Steve Orlofsky and Mark Heinrich)

Poland, Lithuania call for EU help with migration surge at Belarusian border

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland and Lithuania on Friday called on European institutions to help them deal with a surge in illegal migration from Belarus over their borders, as tensions between EU countries and Minsk continues to grow.

On Thursday Poland accused Belarus of sending a growing number of migrants over the border in retaliation for Warsaw’s decision this week to give refuge to Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a Belarusian athlete who refused to return home from the Tokyo Olympics.

“We condemn the weaponization of irregular migration by the Lukashenko regime with a goal of exerting political pressure on the EU and its individual Member States,” Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Simonytr said in a joint statement.

In the past two days alone 133 illegal migrants were stopped at the Belarusian border with Poland, compared to 122 during the whole of last year, a spokesperson for the Poland Border Guard said.

In recent weeks, Lithuania has also reported a surge in illegal border crossings from Belarus and said Minsk was flying in migrants from abroad and dispatching them into the EU.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Thursday accused Lithuania and Poland of fueling the migrant issue on the border.

In the statement, Poland and Lithuania appealed to the European Commission, Frontex, EASO, other EU member states, and partners outside the EU for political and practical support and called to strengthen EU migration and asylum policy.

“We firmly believe that the protection of external Schengen borders is not just the duty of individual member states but also the common responsibility of the EU,” the statement says.

European Union home affairs ministers and representatives of the EU border agency Frontex and Europol are set to discuss the issue on Aug. 18, a letter by Slovenia to EU diplomats seen by Reuters showed.

(Reporting by Alicja Ptak and Anna Wlodarczak-semczuk; Editing by Angus MacSwan and Raissa Kasolowsky)

Poland says Belarus lets migrants cross border in ‘hybrid war’ with EU

WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland accused Belarus of sending a growing number of migrants over the border in retaliation for Warsaw’s decision this week to give refuge to Krystsina Tsimanouskaya, a Belarusian athlete who refused to return home from the Tokyo Olympics.

A deputy interior minister, Maciej Wasik, said on Thursday that Minsk was “waging a hybrid war with the European Union with the help of illegal immigrants.”

In recent weeks, neighbor and fellow EU member state Lithuania has reported a surge in illegal border crossings from Belarus and said Minsk was flying in migrants from abroad and dispatching them into the EU.

“There are both young men and women with children. Belarus is using these immigrants as a living weapon,” Wasik told online broadcaster Telewizja wPolsce.

“In recent days we have seen an increase (in migrants). We treat it as a reaction to the granting of asylum to the Belarusian sprinter.”

Tsimanouskaya’s Cold War-style defection has ratcheted up Western tensions with Minsk at a time when the EU has accused President Alexander Lukashenko of using migrants to hit back against EU sanctions.

Officials in the Belarusian government could not immediately be reached for comment.

Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko on Thursday accused Lithuania and Poland of fueling the migrant issue on the border, saying Lithuania wanted to drive migrants into Belarusian territory by force.

Belarus in May decided to let migrants enter Lithuania in retaliation for EU sanctions meted out after Minsk forced a Ryanair flight to land on its soil and arrested a dissident blogger who was on board.

Lukashenko at the time said Belarus would not become a “holding site” for migrants from Africa and the Middle East.

The Polish Border Guard told Reuters it had detained a group of 71 migrants on the border with Belarus during the night from Wednesday to Thursday and another group of 62, mostly Iraqis, on Wednesday.

That is more that the total of 122 illegal migrants the Border Guard said were detained along the frontier in the whole of last year. Last month, 242 migrants were intercepted.

Wasik said migrants arriving recently had mainly been from Iraq but also from Afghanistan.

The interior ministry did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

The EU has summoned the Belarusian envoy in Brussels and held talks with the Iraqi government over the issue of illegal migration to the bloc.

(Reporting by Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk and Agnieszka Barteczko in Warsaw, Matthias Williams in London, writing by Alan Charlish, Editing by William Maclean, Mark Heinrich and Steve Orlofsky)

Poland tightens quarantine rules after cases of Indian COVID-19 variant

WARSAW (Reuters) – People travelling to Poland from Brazil, India and South Africa will have to quarantine, the Polish health minister said on Tuesday, as he announced cases of a COVID-19 variant first detected in India in the Warsaw and Katowice areas.

The outbreaks poses a fresh risk to Poland just as it starts to emerge from a highly damaging third wave of the pandemic.

“In the case of Brazil, India and South Africa, people travelling from these locations will automatically have to quarantine without the possibility of getting an exception due to a test,” Health Minister Adam Niedzielski told a news conference.

The number of infections involving the Indian variant in Poland has now reached 16, including two cases in the family of a Polish diplomat who had returned from India, Niedzielski said.

Poland has so far reported 2,808,052 cases of COVID-19 and 68,133 deaths.

Poland reopened shopping centers on Tuesday, the beginning of a gradual unfreezing of the economy that will see restaurants, hotels and schools reopening at different points in May.

(Reporting by Alan Charlish and Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Gareth Jones)

‘You can’t clone us’: Polish doctors cry for help as COVID deaths spike

By Joanna Plucinska and Alicja Ptak

KRAKOW, Poland (Reuters) – When the pandemic began last year, Kinga Szlachcic-Wyroba, an anesthesiologist in the Stefan Zeromski Specialist Hospital in Krakow, Poland, had to manage one COVID-19 patient and 10 others in intensive care with three other doctors.

Now the third wave has hit Poland and the number of COVID-19 patients in intensive care stands at 17, with just four non-COVID sufferers. Around 80% of the COVID patients are expected to die.

Szlachcic-Wyroba, however, is still working with only three other doctors.

“We are physically doing our best but we are frequently unable to secure the care that we would like to provide,” she said in the ward’s break room for staff, lined with couches and a stray sleeping bag, adding that when on shift they often can’t even take a break to sit down.

As COVID-related deaths in Poland surpass 800 a day and the country hits a European record for excess deaths, epidemiologists have pointed to a major medical personnel shortage as one of the culprits.

Szlachcic-Wyroba is exhausted from 24-hour shifts and comforting patients’ families, adding that the flood of critically ill patients in recent weeks surpassed “even my worst dreams”.

Across Poland, doctors have complained about long lines of ambulances at hospitals or rescheduled non-COVID surgeries for life-threatening illnesses.

“The country was unprepared for this scale of an epidemic… There are no beds, no personnel, simply no reserves,” said professor Krzysztof Simon, a regional epidemiology consultant from Lower Silesia.

According to Eurostat, Poland had only 2.4 doctors and 5.1 nurses per 1,000 citizens in 2017, among the lowest in the EU, even before the pandemic.

Many doctors have gone abroad in search of better pay, with health spending not enough to attract or retain staff.

“The healthcare system is now at its limit but it has been at this limit basically for as long as I can remember. The epidemic has just multiplied all of its shortcomings,” said Piotr Meryk, head doctor at the Zeromski hospital’s COVID ward.

That means deaths have spiked this year, doctors say, as COVID patients are reluctant to go to hospital, fearing poor conditions and patients suffering from other serious illnesses are neglected by specialists relocated to COVID wards.

After Brazil, Poland had the second highest cumulative number of confirmed deaths in the world the week of April 13, according to Our World in Data.

SOLUTIONS?

The government has promised to address the issue, but staff are hard to find despite efforts to recruit medical students and Ukrainian doctors.

“You can buy equipment, build temporary hospitals, produce more beds, but personnel is the element that is creating a bottleneck,” Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said in February.

In a statement to Reuters, the ministry said it had taken legislative steps in recent years to recruit more nurses and doctors.

But as patients flood wards, Meryk said these steps were not enough, and he urged the government to prepare for future pandemics.

“You can’t just make these doctors appear or clone them.”

Polish hospitals under strain as coronavirus cases hit 2021 record

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland reported a record number of new coronavirus cases on Wednesday just shy of 30,000, as the pandemic cripples hospitals in some parts of the country and the government mulls sending patients to different regions to help cope.

Poland has been hit very hard by a third wave of cases and a highly contagious variant of the virus first discovered in Britain. The regions of Silesia in the south and Mazowiecki, where the capital Warsaw is located, in particular have struggled.

The government has faced criticism for failing to support the healthcare system as cases rise, while it has called on the public to observe current restrictions more closely.

“Poland’s eyes are focused on Silesia,” Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said on Wednesday, adding that the government was considering moving patients from the south to the east, where more beds are available.

In Silesia, Tuesday data showed that of 305 available respirators, 257 were occupied, while 2,894 of 3,723 hospital beds were occupied.

Doctors said the whole country’s healthcare system was struggling, however.

“We are lacking beds everywhere, let’s not fool ourselves. This is an all-Poland situation,” immunologist Pawel Grzesiowski told Reuters.

On Wednesday the number of occupied beds rose to 26,511 from 26,075, while occupied ventilators rose edged up to 2,537. The ministry said it has 35,444 hospital beds available for COVID-19 patients and 3,366 ventilators.

Poland reported 29,978 new infections on Wednesday and 575 daily coronavirus-related deaths, a record in 2021.

The country has reported 2.12 million confirmed cases overall and 50,340 deaths.

The government ordered theatres, shopping malls, hotels and cinemas to close last week as cases rose.

More restrictions loom ahead of the Easter holidays, typically marked by packed church services and family gatherings in the deeply Catholic country.

“We have to suffocate the third wave. That’s why we will announce new restrictions…that will be enforced during the week before and the week after the (Easter) holidays,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki told a news conference on Wednesday.

Those restrictions are expected to be announced on Thursday.

(Reporting by Agnieszka Barteczko, Joanna Plucinska, Alicja Ptak and Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Hugh Lawson)

Polish doctors torn over mental health as grounds to bypass near-total abortion ban

By Joanna Plucinska and Kuba Stezycki

WARSAW (Reuters) – When Polish doctors told Paulina, 29, that her unborn child had no kidneys and would die upon birth, she knew she couldn’t go through with the pregnancy.

“Everyone says that the reward after the pain of birth is holding your child in your hands,” said Paulina, a retail manager from Gdynia, who asked Reuters to withhold her surname.

“I would have nothing. I would give birth to a dead child, and that pain would be a thousand times worse.”

Until two months ago, women like Paulina still stood a chance of being allowed an abortion in Poland. However, in a ruling that came into effect in January, the constitutional court decided that terminating pregnancies due to fetal abnormalities was no longer legal, effectively imposing a near-total ban on abortions.

Polish law now considers only incest, rape or a threat to a mother’s life and health as valid grounds to terminate a pregnancy.

Poland’s ruling nationalists supported the move but the country was rocked by weeks of nationwide protests following the Oct. 22 ruling, which quickly morphed into an outpouring of anger against the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government and the powerful Catholic Church.

Paulina’s only option, therefore, was to find a doctor willing to attest that giving birth was a threat to her health.

Two weeks after Paulina learned of her baby’s condition, abortion rights activists helped her to find a psychiatrist prepared to state that she needed to have an abortion on mental health grounds, and her abortion went ahead.

This makes her one of perhaps only around a dozen women who has managed to get an abortion on such grounds since the ruling came into effect, abortion support groups told Reuters.

Several doctors and lawyers Reuters spoke to maintain that abortions on mental health grounds are in keeping with the law, but government officials and conservative groups call this into question.

Poland’s Ministry of Health told Reuters in an emailed statement that a qualified medical specialist in the appropriate field should determine if a pregnancy threatens the life or health of the mother, depending on the woman’s illness.

It did not say if it considered a threat to mental health as sufficient grounds for an abortion.

“I’ve seen opinions like, ‘I’m anxious and I don’t want to give birth’,” Michal Wojcik, a government minister and member of the socially conservative United Poland grouping allied with the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party, told Reuters.

“I don’t think we should count such instances, which are there to simply go around the rules.”

A lawyer for Ordo Iuris, a campaign group that champions ultra-conservative and religious causes, also told Reuters that, in her opinion, giving a recommendation on the basis of mental health was illegal.

ABORTION ACCESS SHRINKING

Some women have chosen to get abortions abroad, despite the coronavirus pandemic and the associated travel restrictions. Paulina was initially told she should go to the Netherlands, a trip she was afraid to do alone.

According to abortion support groups, several women are waiting to find a doctor who is willing to help them, of which there are still very few. This is partly out of fear: Under Polish law, women who undergo an illegal abortion face no penalty, while a doctor can be jailed for up to three years.

In addition, many doctors in Poland, especially in the more conservative southeast, were already exercising their legal right to refuse on religious grounds to terminate pregnancies before the ruling went into force. More are expected to do so now.

Of the four doctors who agreed to support Paulina’s case for an abortion, only one, Aleksandra Krasowska, a Warsaw-based psychiatrist, was willing to be named by Reuters, and confirmed that she had referred Paulina for the termination due to her deteriorating mental health. The other three – a psychiatrist, doctor and a gynecologist – spoke to Reuters anonymously.

“It’s important that this isn’t a one-person decision … Then it’s easier for all of us, to handle this fear of the prosecutor and of the three years in jail,” one of the psychiatrists involved told Reuters.

Maciej Socha, a Gdansk-based gynecologist, is one of few doctors willing to argue publicly that a threat to a woman’s mental health should be accepted as a grounds for abortion.

“If a patient has a brain tumor and continuing the pregnancy threatens her life and health, we can end the pregnancy. If a patient has psychiatric reasons …, then in my opinion, this is enough to end such a pregnancy,” Socha said.

Paulina believes the doctors who helped her terminate her pregnancy saved her life. “These people are heroes. That they aren’t afraid of the consequences from this sick country that they live in,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Alicja Ptak and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Czech Republic asks other countries for help with COVID-19 patients: health ministry

PRAGUE (Reuters) – The Czech Republic has asked Germany, Switzerland and Poland to take in dozens of COVID-19 patients as the situation in its own hospitals has reached a critical point, Prague’s Health Ministry said on Friday.

The country of 10.7 million has been one of the hardest-hit globally in recent weeks as many regional hospitals, overwhelmed by the inflow of coronavirus patients, had to transfer them elsewhere, in some cases taking them hundreds of miles away.

“The large number of newly infected patients has intensified pressure on the healthcare system, and the number of patients requiring hospitalization is growing,” the ministry said.

As of Friday morning, there were 8,153 COVID patients hospitalized, including 1,735 requiring intensive care, Health Ministry data showed.

“In some regions, the hospitals have exhausted their capacity and they are no longer able to provide appropriate care or to accept new patients without help from others,” Health Minister Jan Blatny said in the release.

Across the country, 13% of the overall intensive care capacity was available, while in the capital Prague, the free capacity was at 5%.

Neighboring Slovakia transferred its first coronavirus patients abroad this week as its hospitals filled with COVID-19 patients.

(Reporting by Robert Muller; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Hugh Lawson)

Poland’s opposition loosens abortion stance to please younger voters

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland’s main opposition party called on Thursday for changes in the law to allow pregnancies to be terminated on demand, in a substantial policy shift amid growing strife over abortion in the predominantly Catholic nation.

However, while the centrist Civic Platform (PO) announced a change in its platform, legislative changes are unlikely in the current parliamentary term which is due to continue until 2023.

A Constitutional Court ruling mandating a near total ban on abortion from last October has upturned nearly three decades of broad consensus in Poland that abortion should be allowed only in the case of rape, incest, a threat to the mother’s health and fetal abnormality.

The ruling also exposed growing support among young voters in particular for a liberalization of abortion rules in line with the European mainstream, despite the nationalist government’s backing of the court verdict.

The PO said on Thursday it wanted women to have access to abortions at up to 12 weeks of pregnancy in “difficult” situations after consulting with a doctor and psychologist, while also calling for broader access to sex education, birth control, in vitro and prenatal testing.

“This is a response to what our voters expect. A clear stance on this matter,” PO head Borys Budka told a news conference.

Political observers say young voters, many of whom filled the streets with protests for weeks after the court ruling, may be crucial to the outcome of the next parliamentary election, due in 2023.

Opinion surveys have shown a sharp turn towards the left among youth, while the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) appeals to older, poorer voters. Budka’s PO has relied on centrist voters and moderate conservatives for over two decades.

A February poll published by Polish daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna showed that over 40% of Poles, especially younger voters, believe abortion rules should be liberalized.

An SW Research poll conducted soon after the court ruling indicates that over 70% of Poles were against the decision to further restrict abortion rights in the country.

(Reporting by Joanna Plucinska; Editing by Justyna Pawlak and Frances Kerry)

Polish ruling restricting abortion to take effect on Wednesday

By Anna Koper and Joanna Plucinska

WARSAW (Reuters) – A Polish Constitutional Court verdict restricting access to abortion will go into effect on Wednesday, Poland’s government said, three months after it sparked nationwide protests.

In October, the Constitutional Court said termination of pregnancies due to fetal defects should be banned, ending the most common of the few legal grounds for abortion that remained in the largely Roman Catholic country.

Under the ruling, abortions are now only permitted in cases of rape and incest, and when the mother’s life or health is endangered, pushing Poland further from the European mainstream.

Officials from the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party said the government would now focus on assisting parents of disabled children, although PiS and its predecessors have been accused by critics of not doing enough to help such families so far.

“The state can no longer take a life away only because someone is sick, disabled, in poor health,” PiS lawmaker Bartlomiej Wroblewski told Reuters.

Conservative values have taken a more prominent role in public life since the nationalist PiS took power in 2015. Access to abortion has declined even without the legislative curbs as more doctors refuse to perform the procedure on religious grounds.

Opponents of PiS have accused it of influencing the ruling, because the Constitutional Tribunal is one of the judicial bodies overhauled by the party during reforms that the European Union says have politicized the courts.

“No law-abiding government should respect this ruling,” Borys Budka, leader of Poland’s largest opposition party, the centrist Civic Platform, told reporters.

The government information center said the court’s verdict would be published in its official gazette – a step necessary for it to take effect – later on Wednesday.

Abortion rights activities called for opponents of the ruling to gather in the streets across Poland following the government’s announcement, which had been expected for weeks.

“We are inviting everyone, please, go out, be motivated, so we can walk together, make a mark,” protest group leader Marta Lempart told news conference.

Opinion surveys have shown some decline in PiS popularity in recent months, but a poll by the government-affiliated CBOS pollster showed it edging back up to 35% this month, from 30% in October. PiS and its two small parliamentary allies won re-election in 2019 with a 44% share of the vote.

(Reporting by Anna Koper, Joanna Plucinska and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk; Editing by John Stonestreet and Alex Richardson)