Brest is the most significant junction on the border between Belarus and Poland. The city once served as the western gateway to the Soviet Union. All manner of smuggled goods used to pass the checkpoint here, in both directions.
Now, it's refugees that attempt to cross this checkpoint on the EU's external border. According to Polish and Belarusian media, as many as 2,000 Chechens were gathered here waiting to enter the EU during the summer months. It's December now, and there are still many Chechen migrants milling about the train station. [...]
n the meantime, Poland's ombudsman for civil rights as well as Polish human rights groups have started looking more closely at the behavior of the Polish authorities. Their reports state that, as a rule, only two or three families are permitted to file an application for asylum, even if others also declare their desire to do the same. Around 90 percent of arrivals in Terespol are sent back.
By the end of October this year, some 6,573 Chechens had applied for asylum in Terespol. Several hundred other applications were registered in different towns in Poland. These numbers from the authorities are not much higher than the numbers in the past year. That's despite a much higher number of migrants who were denied entrance in Terespol, from around 19,000 in 2015 to more than 78,000 this year. Many of those sent back are Chechens.
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