The use of 'Push-back policies' by Polish officers from the perspective of the provisions of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court

In assessing the conduct of Polish officers in the context of their push-back operations, or deportation, meaning the process of forcing back to Belarus persons who, in the opinion of the Polish authorities, have illegally crossed the border, I will confine myself to one crime listed in Art. 5 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (hereinafter ICC) and defined in Art. 7 thereof, namely the crime against humanity. Given the absence of genocidal intent, the assessment will not address whether the conditions for the crime of genocide, as defined in Art. 6 of the ICC Statute, are met. Furthermore, due to the absence of an armed conflict on the territory of Poland, the assessment will not address war crimes or aggression, as we are not dealing so far with acts that could be qualified as aggression. For such an evaluation to be possible, acts of aggression would have to occur which, according to Art. 8 bis of the Statute, would ‘by its character, gravity and scale, constitute a manifest violation of the Charter of the United Nations’. According to the Understandings regarding the amendment to the Statute, these conditions must be met contemporaneously and must be sufficiently grave to justify the indisputability of such an assessment. The incidents at the border that are currently taking place do not meet these prerequisites to the extent that would justify describing them as acts of aggression.