In the summer of 2021 deliberate actions by the Belarusian state authorities led to a huge increase of people irregularly crossing the border from Belarus to Poland. Instead of addressing this humanitarian crisis, the Polish government responded with actions that were in violation of its international obligations and domestic law. Among these measures was carrying out “pushbacks” and grounding them in Polish domestic law. “Pushbacks” are the practice of returning people to the border without assessing their individual situation. The formalization of those practices in 2021 was done within two legal frameworks; one interim and one permanent. They continue to function in parallel while containing different provisions. This article assesses the two frameworks’ compatibility with domestic and international law and concludes that they both violate domestic and international rules. In the context of EU law, the article demonstrates the incompatibility of the two frameworks with the so-called Asylum Procedures Directive and Return Directive. The article further argues that the pushbacks violate the European Convention of Human Rights and would not fall within the exceptions to the prohibition of collective expulsions.

Given the whole spectrum of doubts and controversies that arise in discussions about laws affecting historical memory (and their subcategory of memory laws), the question of assessing them in the context of international standards of human rights protection – and in particular the European system of human rights protection – is often overlooked. Thus this article focuses on the implications and conditions for introducing memory laws in light of international human rights standards using selected examples of various types of recently-adopted Polish memory laws as case studies. The authors begin with a brief description of the phenomenon of memory laws and the most significant threats that they pose to the protection of international human rights standards. The following sections analyse selected Polish laws affecting historical memory vis-à-vis these standards. The analysis covers non-binding declaratory laws affecting historical memory, and acts that include criminal law sanctions. The article attempts to sketch the circumstances linking laws affecting historical memory with the human rights protection standards, including those entailed both in binding treaties and other instruments of international law.