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.