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Tuesday, 23 November 2021 (YJC)_ The EU has published a draft law that would blacklist airlines and travel operators that fly people to countries on its borders as part of attempts to destabilise the bloc.
The EU has published a draft law that would blacklist airlines and travel operators that fly people to countries on its borders as part of attempts to destabilise the bloc, in its latest response to the crisis at the Poland-Belarus border.
The proposal does not specifically mention Belarus, whose authoritarian leader, Alexander Lukashenko, is accused of engineering the arrival of thousands of people at the Polish border, where a desperate humanitarian situation has played out in recent weeks.
Companies could be banned from flying through the EU and landing and refuelling at EU airports, regardless of whether their involvement in attempts at destabilisation was intentional or not. The proposal closes a gap in EU sanctions laws, which are country-specific.
The EU recently agreed to extend sanctions against Belarus, but it can only target Belarusian companies rather than foreign airlines involved in bringing people to Minsk from the Middle East.
Ylva Johansson, the EU home affairs commissioner, said the law was needed in response to an unprecedented situation. She said Lukashenko was “trying to sell tickets to the EU”, charging people €10,000-€20,000 for a one-way trip to Minsk and onward travel to the EU border.
“We see the need to reach out directly to those travel companies which – unintentionally, most of the time – are being part of a state-sponsored smuggling scheme orchestrated by a desperate and non-democratic regime,” Johansson said.
European Commission officials believe much of the value of the law lies in the power to deter companies from getting involved in such schemes. “Hopefully we don’t need to use it,” Johansson said, adding that it had taken airline companies “some time to understand how they are being used”.
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