Frontex has withdrawn its assistance in the deportation of a group of Pakistanis from Poland due to concerns raised by the tightening of refugee regulations, writes Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, as cited by the wPolityce news portal. 

Poland has participated in a total of eight return operations this year, all carried out in cooperation with Frontex, with three of them involving Pakistani citizens being sent back to their homeland.

This was supposed to happen on Nov. 4 as well, but after a complaint filed by the Rule of Law Institute, the agency decided to cancel the charter flight from Radom to Frankfurt, from where the foreigners expelled from Poland were supposed to be transferred to Islamabad.

The institute, a member of the Consultative Forum at Frontex, warned the agency against participating in an operation that may violate international regulations protecting refugees.

“This includes the principle of non-refoulement, which prohibits deportation to a country where a person would be at risk of persecution,” wrote DGP.

The newspaper noted that although Frontex had not previously expressed any major reservations about the Polish asylum system and deportation procedure, including the controversial regulation on suspending the right to apply for asylum at the Polish-Belarusian border, this time it decided to cancel the flight in order to investigate all the doubts more thoroughly.