The European Union has been backtracking on its defence of human rights for some time now, especially when it comes to immigration and, even more so, when it comes to confronting the xenophobic policies of Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Poland. While last week it announced that he would allocate some €3.5m to pay for the repatriation of immigrants stranded in Belarus after Aleksandr Lukashenko's tour de force, on Wednesday it opened the door for Poland, Latvia and Lithuania – the countries that have come under greatest migratory pressure at their borders because of this policy – to cut back on the right to asylum and to bypass international standards on refugee protection. The situation is very delicate because, although it is clear that this is a complex problem in which the Belarusian government has used the desperation of migrants to put pressure on the EU and avoid sanctions, the result is that, in the public eye, it seems that the dictator has got away with it.