Poland’s pushback drive and EU asylum ‘emergency’ plan put rights ‘on a cliff edge’, warns Europe’s top rights chief

Europe’s human rights framework is on a cliff edge and risks unravelling everything achieved since World War Two, following fresh Polish and EU efforts to restrict asylum, according to Europe’s top rights defender. “Political leaders really have to become much more sensitive to how fragile the moment is, or to put it another way, the extent to which we’re on a cliff edge,” said Michael O’Flaherty, who is the human rights commissioner at the Council of Europe, a rights watchdog based in Strasbourg. Speaking to EUobserver on Monday (21 September), O’Flaherty was responding to recent initiatives by Poland to loosen UN rules on pushbacks, which are illegal. And he dovetailed those efforts into a new proposal by the European Commission to create a so-called European emergency response framework. O’Flaherty declined to speculate on the framework itself, given the lack of details behind it, but commission president Ursula von der Leyen last week described it as an instrument needed to counter “engineered and weaponised” migrants arriving at the EU’s external borders. The Polish connection with von der Leyen’s announcement came in public statements by the country’s deputy minister of interior Maciek Duszczyk, who claimed credit for the commission plans. “Bravo Us!!”, he announced on X. Ursula von der Leyen właśnie potwierdziła, że wzorowany na polskim zawieszeniu „prawa do azylu” specjalny instrument odpowiedzi na instrumentalizację i weponizację migracji będzie obowiązywał w całej UE, a ochrona granic zewnętrznych nie podlega dyskusji. Brawo My!! @MSWiA_GOV_PL— Maciek Duszczyk (@MaciekDuszczyk) September 16, 2026 Duszczyk has been arguing that Article 33 of the UN convention on refugees allows for pushbacks in certain cases, whenever violence is used to cross a border. According to Polish media, he now plans to discuss the derogations at the upcoming EU summit in mid-October, when heads of state and government gather in Brussels.