Belarus forces accused of raping women fleeing to Poland

Testimonies are emerging of sexual violence against women and girls attempting to enter Poland from Belarus, in a wider report on illegal pushbacks of prospective asylum seekers.

Published on Tuesday (18 March) by Oxfam and its Polish partner Egala, the 66-page report sheds light into what the campaigners say is a systemic denial of the right to asylum along the countries' shared land border, which spans the Białowieża Forest.

"Women and girls face particularly extreme risks, with significant reports of sexual abuse by Belarusian forces, including rape and gang rape," says the report.

The clampdown along the shared land border has raised alarms among rights defenders since at least 2021, when Belarus started shuffling people across the border to stoke tensions with Poland.

The Polish reaction has since included a heavily fortified 247km land border with a mix of Polish soldiers and border guards, as well as an exclusion zone where journalists and aid workers are banned.

Recently, some 280 attempts to cross were made in the span of only two days, according to the Polish Border Guard. "Almost of all of them were thwarted," it said, in a post on X.

And while reports of collective illegal pushbacks by Polish guards are not uncommon, the testimonies of rape pose additional questions on whether the forced returns can be justified even under Polish government standards.

The document cites Judyta Kuc, head of mission support at Médecins Sans Frontières, as stating that some of their patients reported being raped before being able to cross into Poland.

Some are now describing the Belarus side of the border as a "death zone" overseen by increasingly cruel Belarusian uniformed services.

“This is the ‘hell’ Poland is sending people back to, and it is sponsored by the EU,” said Sarah Redd, Oxfam Ukraine advocacy lead, in a press statement. 

At least 87 people have died on both sides of the border from September 2021 to near the end of last year, according to We Are Monitoring, a civil society group. Last year, a Polish border guard was also stabbed to death.

Framed as a security threat and part of a hybrid warfare from Russia and Belarus, the issue has seen an increase in violence along the border.

In a sign of the escalating abuse, those who are forced back into Belarus are targeted and punished, says the report. This includes being mauled by dogs, waterboarded or electrocuted. At least one person is said to have had his finger cut off as punishment.

But the prospect of ending collective pushbacks by Poland, as recommended by the authors of the report, also appears dim.

Last month, the Polish government introduced a bill that would allow it to temporarily suspend asylum and later endorsed as a security imperative by the European Commission.

"We are witnessing a full-blown rule-of-law crisis at the EU level when it comes to migration and asylum," said Maciej Grześkowiak, a researcher at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Warsaw, in an EUobserver op-ed.