Second-class EUropean citizenship : deportation of Poles under the European Arrest Warrant

Citizenship Studies 2026, online first, s. 1-19.

Współautorstwo: Wzorek, Dominik

The paper critically analyses deportation practices involving Polish citizens who, after committing a crime in Poland, left the country without serving their sentence and settled in other EU member states. Building on the literature on deportation practices, which are seen as a technique of population management defining modern citizenship, the paper discusses the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) as a ‘reverse deportation’. It examines how Polish authorities use the EAW against Polish citizens to interrupt their stay in an EU member state and force them to return to Poland. We argue that these practices exemplify ‘contingent EU citizenship’ by limiting the rights of certain categories of people (in this case, those with a criminal conviction) who cannot fully exercise their right to stay in another EU country. Consequently, their status in these countries is only temporary and conditional. Finally, the article addresses resistance to these practices.

This work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, under Grant number UMO-2018/30/M/HS5/00816.

The Influence of the Covid-19 Syndemic and the Humanitarian Crisis at the Polish–Belarusian Border on Courts’ Decisions to Impose Detention

Detention and Deportation in Europe : Analyses, Contestations, and Radical Visions in the Aftermath of Covid-19 / Francesca Esposito, Teresa Degenhardt, and Annika Lindberg (red.) - Bristol: Bristol University Press, 2026, s. 124-144.

In 2020 and 2021, Poland was affected by two big crises that influenced migrants’ lives and migration policies: the Covid-19 syndemic and the humanitarian crisis on the Polish–Belarusian border. The latter was an effect of the cruel response of Polish (as well as Lithuanian and Latvian) authorities to migration influx from the Global South to the EU via external Eastern borders by closing the border and violently pushing people seeking protection in Europe back to the territory of Belarus. Those two crises affected immigrant detention differently. Surprisingly, the syndemic had almost no impact on the number of people deprived of liberty in Poland. The humanitarian crisis, though, brought a fourfold increase in the number of detained people. Despite that new facilities were opened, the living conditions in detention facilities had significantly deteriorated, reaching a level described by the Polish ombudsperson as inhumane. The chapter focuses on the influence of courts on this situation, especially by analyzing how courts adjudicated in detention cases and why they decided to detain so many people.

Eastern Europe : Adrift between the North and the South : Deportation practices from the Polish perspective

Border Criminologies from the Periphery : Cross-National Conversations on Bordered Penality / José A. Brandariz, Giulia Fabini, Cristina Fernández-Bessa, Valeria Ferraris (eds.) – Abingdon: Routledge, 2025, s. 322-338.

Being a border country Poland shares a lot of similarities with EU southern states whose migration policy is focused on the protection of the border and the practices of collective expulsions (pushbacks) of people on the move. But at the same time, many Polish citizens who live in other European countries experience treatment similar to citizens of the Global South: being perceived as not belonging and exposed to deportation practices. Using (crim)migration in Poland as my points of reference, I argue that Eastern Europe is a territory in between – not being part of the Global South, but also not belonging (yet) to the Global North.

Criminalisation of forced marriages in Poland : the critical analyses of the reasons behind this current legal change

International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 2025, t. 83, online first.

In 2023, Polish law saw the establishment of a new crime: forcing a person to marry someone. These provisions were combined with and supplemented by the criminalisation of luring a person to leave Poland with the intention of forcing them into marriage. This legislation was rather unexpected, considering that at the time, the government and the parliamentary majority were composed of alt-right political parties that were actively opposing both women's rights and the influx of immigrants, especially from what politicians referred to as “culturally distant countries”. In this paper, I present the newly adopted legislation and analyse its reasons against the backdrop of two case studies: the Polish Roma community and the Chechen community in Poland. The latter is based on fieldwork involving interviews with refugee women who experienced various forms of domestic violence while in Poland, as well as experts working with this group. These forms of gender-based violence included forced marriages, mostly in the form of early marriages. The paper aims to assess whether this new regulation has the potential to improve the protection of potential victims, especially women with migration backgrounds in Poland and, more broadly, whether criminal law is the appropriate response to social problems and the best tool to protect potential victims when abusers are family members.

ECtHR jurisprudence amid political shifts : rolling back the protection against pushbacks

International Journal of Human Rights 2025, online first.

Współautorstwo: Kmak, Magdalena

In this article, we scrutinise the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgments issued in cases of border protection and pushbacks since 2016. We argue that these judgments issued amid political shifts on national and regional levels and mounting criticism of the Court have generated interconnected effects of (1) lowering the standards of protection of the people on the move; (2) shifting the emphasis from human rights protection at the border towards protection of the border; and (3) particularisation of rights protection by limiting protection of certain groups of people on the move. Such a process leads, as we argue, to undermining the Court’s original mandate from primarily safeguarding individuals’ human rights (the person-centric mandate) towards foregrounding the sovereignty of states.