Feminist institutional strategies in a hostile state: abortion and the rights of refugees in Poland

Our presentation will focus on institutional feminist and human rights responses undertaken during the last term of the Polish Parliament (2019-2023) when the country was led by Law and Justice [Prawo i Sprawiedliwość], a right-wing populist and national-conservative party. We will examine two case studies: (1) political and social struggles regarding the legality and availability of abortion, which arose after the 2020 Constitutional Court's ruling, and (2) the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border starting in 2021 with the introduction of the state of emergency, which involved illegal pushbacks of refugees. Our aim is to highlight two novel strategies employed by feminist institutional actors in a political context hostile to feminist and human rights claims. The first strategy concerns incorporating activist language and social movements’ symbols into the parliamentary language and its physical space. The second is about the targeted and tailored use of parliamentary immunity as a political tool to protect citizens ‘rights and their physical safety. We will show different illustrations of this feminist institutional strategy: (1) when parliamentary immunity becomes a tool to gain access to public spaces denied to citizens under the state of emergency; (2) when it provides necessary protection against police brutality during public protests, (3) when it prevents individual rights’ infringements as in the cases of demanding legal abortions in public hospitals. Our analysis builds on semi-structured interviews with members of parliament (MPs) and technical staff from the biggest oppositional parties, Left Together [Lewica Razem] and Civil Coalition [Koalicja Obywatelska], accompanied by qualitative analysis of 17 stenographic records of the parliamentary debates concerning abortion and the situation on the Polish-Belarusian border.