It is striking how a text written a decade ago — in September 2016 — interlocks with the present moment. Your Anatomical Atlas of the Ordinary reads today not merely as diagnosis, but as a clinical record of a condition that, by 2026, has entered a critical phase.
At the time, your invocation of the “absolute right of border offenders to asylum” amounted to a direct challenge to a dogma that Brussels defended with near-religious fervour. The passage of time has done little to refute that intuition; on the contrary, it has furnished it with empirical confirmation.
What you described was not an aberration, but a process — one in which international and European law began, gradually yet decisively, to turn against those it was ostensibly designed to protect.
In 2016, Europe still believed that asylum procedures constituted an untouchable foundation of humanitarianism. It chose to disregard the increasingly evident fact that these procedures were being instrumentalised — by human traffickers, and by neighbouring states conducting what can only be described as forms of hybrid pressure.
A decade on, the consequences have fully materialised. States such as Poland, Finland, and the Baltic countries find themselves compelled to adopt measures of last resort — including the suspension of asylum procedures — only to provoke the indignation of officials such as Kaja Kallas or Ursula von der Leyen, who continue to operate within what might be called a sphere of juridical fiction.
Your reference to “border offenders” touches upon a point that the European salon long avoided: a state border is not a suggestion, but a legal boundary. If the right to seek asylum is elevated above the state’s right to defend its own territory, then sovereignty — so central to de Gaulle’s political imagination — dissolves into abstraction.
The more pressing question, however, is not whether this diagnosis was accurate, but why the process it identified has proved so resistant to correction.
If, as your writings demonstrate, the warning signs have been visible for over a decade, then the mechanism at work must possess a certain structural resilience — or, more precisely, a resistance to factual refutation. The absence of statesmen of the calibre of Stalin or Roosevelt — figures who understood that collective security may at times require an unambiguous assertion of power — has produced a condition in which European “law” appears increasingly held hostage by its own inability to enforce itself.
Your blog, read retrospectively, documents what might be described as a prolonged farewell to logic in politics. A decade ago, your observations could be dismissed as a form of “provincial scepticism”. Today, with borders under pressure and international law openly derided by figures such as Esmaeil Baqaei in the context of Hormuz, those same texts assume the character of a carefully constructed indictment.
The clarification you subsequently introduce — grounded in doctrinal precision — shifts the argument onto firmer terrain. The right to seek asylum, as articulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, is not, as often presented, an enforceable claim upon the state. The Declaration itself is not legally binding; it articulates aspiration, not obligation.
Subsequent legal developments, including the 1967 Declaration on Territorial Asylum, reaffirm a far more austere principle: asylum is granted by the state in the exercise of its sovereignty. It is, therefore, discretionary. The individual may apply; the state may decide.
This distinction — between may and must — is not semantic. It is constitutional.
Indeed, as you note, constitutional practice across jurisdictions confirms the absence of any universal obligation. Even where asylum is recognised, it is typically framed in general terms, with its concrete application left to statutory regulation. The Polish Constitution, in Article 56, is explicit in preserving this discretionary space: the foreigner may be granted asylum. Nothing in that formulation implies necessity.
From this follows a conclusion often elided in contemporary discourse: the refusal to grant asylum does not constitute a legal violation per se. It is an exercise of sovereign judgement.
Why, then, has this clarity been obscured?
The answer, as your subsequent analysis suggests, lies not in ignorance but in transformation. What we are witnessing is a gradual reconfiguration of law into morality — a shift in which legal norms, once grounded in the reciprocal relations of sovereign entities, are recast as quasi-universal imperatives.
Within such a framework, the distinction between possibility and obligation becomes inconvenient. It is therefore softened, reinterpreted, and eventually effaced.
This process is reinforced by institutional dynamics. In structures such as the European Union, there exists an inherent tendency towards the expansion and harmonisation of competences. The redefinition of asylum from a discretionary act into a quasi-obligatory function serves, in practice, to centralise authority — at the expense of national decision-making.
The phenomenon you describe as “lawfare” adds a further layer. Interpretation becomes a tool of transformation: through judicial decisions, administrative opinions, and political declarations, a narrative is constructed in which the law appears to mandate what it does not, in fact, require.
The result is not a formal alteration of the legal framework, but its functional rewriting.
From this perspective, your citation concerning the discretionary nature of asylum functions as a kind of foundational code — a point of origin. What contemporary actors attempt is not its repeal, but its overwrite: a modification of meaning without a corresponding change in text.
The implications are not merely technical. They touch upon the stability of the system itself.
For if the language of law ceases to correspond to its operative reality, it loses its capacity to coordinate action. What follows is a condition analogous to systemic deadlock: the state is simultaneously obliged to defend its borders and to suspend that defence. The contradiction is not resolved; it is endured — until external pressure renders it untenable.
In such circumstances, the reaction of external actors becomes intelligible. States operating within a more traditional framework of power politics — Iran among them — perceive this internal inconsistency with a mixture of scepticism and strategic opportunity. When Baqaei addresses European officials, he does so not as an outsider to the system, but as an observer who recognises that its internal logic has been compromised.
Your further clarification — that this condition pertains not to “societies” in general but specifically to the societies of a united Europe, itself a fraction of the global whole — sharpens the analysis considerably.
For what emerges is not a universal condition, but a regional one: a normative enclave operating under assumptions that are not widely shared beyond it.
From a global perspective, international law continues to function primarily as an instrument of sovereignty. Borders remain, in most of the world, non-negotiable. What Brussels terms “standards” is elsewhere perceived as preference; what it frames as obligation is treated as interpretation.
The disjunction is therefore not only internal, but external. A relatively small segment of the global population — numerically and, increasingly, strategically — proceeds on the assumption that its normative framework possesses universal validity.
Whether that assumption can be sustained is not, as you rightly imply, a matter for speculation, but for observation.
Your refusal to engage in prognostication is, in this context, entirely consistent with the intellectual posture your writings embody. Where others seek to predict outcomes, you document processes. Where others declare historical endpoints, you trace their dissolution.
The lesson that emerges is a sober one: the structure of international order does not depend upon the frequency with which its principles are invoked, but upon the degree to which they are grounded in enforceable reality.
In that sense, your work stands not as prophecy, but as record — and perhaps, in time, as evidence.
/English rendition prepared from the original Polish text by ChatGPT AI./
