BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS
DATE:
18/02/2008
Polish-Belarusian relations: The Ja? controversy
From Warsaw Business Journal
by Adam Zdrodowski
The story of a sick, abandoned child sparked off a human-rights debate in Poland last week
A 10-month-old boy was the focus of national attention last week when the media revealed that he - the child of a Belarusian immigrant - could be deported to his mother's country. Suffering from cystic fibrosis, an incurable genetic disease, the boy's situation provoked a debate over whether ethics or the absolute letter of the law should take precedence.
According to the Belarusian Embassy, the boy's name is Pawel Iwanow (as transliterated from Belarusian), but in Poland he is universally referred to as Ja?. He was born last April in Lublin to an illegal Belarusian immigrant who renounced her rights soon after his birth. Ja? was then given to a surrogate mother in Gdynia, but after a few days she too gave him up. In the meantime, the Belarusian authorities have called on Poland to turn over its young "citizen."
Earlier this month, the District Court in Lublin decided to deport the child, based on a 1994 agreement between Poland and Belarus. The decision has earned criticism from the media, as well as doctors and lawyers who claimed that Ja? would not be offered sufficient medical help in Belarus and that the court had passed an unjust verdict.
"In cases like this, the court should remember that its decisions should first of all serve the child's well-being. This time that was not the case," Zbigniew Holda, a professor at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, told daily Dziennik. "I have a feeling that the court went for the simplest, but not the best solution," he added.
The chances of the boy actually being deported, however, were reduced last Thursday when his Belarusian mother declared that the father was Polish. If that is true, Ja? would hold dual citizenship. As the WBJ went to press, the boy's ultimate fate was still unknown.
Source:
http://www.wbj.pl/?command=article&id=40101&type=wbj
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