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.