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

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

Współautorstwo: Klaus, Witold

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.