Poland’s parliamentary speaker applies to be UN High Commissioner for Refugees

Sep 29, 2025 | Politics

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Szymon Hołownia, the speaker of Poland’s parliament, has announced that he has applied to be the next UN High Commissioner for Refugees. He also confirmed that, regardless of the outcome of that process, he will step down as leader of his party, which is part of Poland’s ruling coalition.

“Never before has a Pole been in such a position within the UN,” wrote Hołownia, announcing the news on Monday morning. “I don’t need to explain how important it would be to add a Polish perspective – and, more broadly, an eastern and northern European perspective – to this enormous challenge.”

He revealed that President Karol Nawrocki, Prime Minister Donald Tusk and foreign minister Radosław Sikorski had offered their “unequivocal support” for his application and had “activated our entire diplomatic machinery” to help him.

However, Hołownia’s proposed candidacy has been criticised by the head of Amnesty International in Poland, who notes that he and his party supported the suspension of asylum rights in Poland this year.

Hołownia is the leader of Poland 2050 (Polska 2050), a centrist party that he founded in 2021 and which is a junior partner in Tusk’s ruling coalition, which came to power in December 2023. Since November 2023, Hołownia has also served as speaker of the Sejm, the more powerful lower house of parliament.

Under the coalition agreement that led to Tusk’s government being formed, Hołownia was due to step down as speaker this November, with the position passing to a figure from The Left (Lewica), another member of the coalition.

On Saturday, Poland 2050 confirmed that it had recommended Hołownia be made deputy parliamentary speaker once he steps down. At the same time, Holownia made the surprise announcement that he would not run again to be leader of the party when his term ends in January.

“I founded this organisation, gave it everything I could and knew how to, and I will continue to give as much as necessary,” said Hołownia, quoted by the Rzeczpospolita daily. “But the role of a leader is also to say at some point, ‘I’m passing the baton’. I think that moment has come for me and for the organisation.”

 

Hołownia also added that he “is not going anywhere” and would continue to offer his advice and support to the party. However, on Monday, he revealed that he had last week applied for the position of UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The current commissioner, Filippo Grandi, will finish his second and final five-year term on 31 December this year. His replacement will be chosen in a vote by the UN General Assembly.

“I know the subject of humanitarian support better than politics, having spent twice as long on it, developing my [charitable] foundations around the world,” wrote Hołownia on Monday. He admitted, however, that he believes his chances of obtaining the UNHCR position “are currently not great”.

Hołownia first entered politics in December 2019, when he announced a run as an independent in the 2020 presidential election, where he ended up finishing third, with 14% of the vote. However, in this year’s presidential election, he finished only fifth, with just 5% of the vote.

Before becoming a politician, Hołownia was best known as a journalist and TV presenter. But he was also involved in launching and running charitable foundations that provided humanitarian aid in parts of Africa and Asia. He also served as an ambassador for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

In 2023, shortly after being appointed speaker, Hołownia was criticised by the right-wing opposition for hosting a Christmas party in parliament at which he was pictured with asylum seekers who had irregularly crossed the border from Belarus.

Since 2021, the Belarusian authorities have engineered a migration crisis at the border, where they have encouraged and helped tens of thousands of people – mainly from the Middle East, Asia and Africa – to cross into Poland and other EU countries.

In 2024, Hołownia criticised the ongoing practice – started under the former Law and Justice (PiS) government and continued by the Tusk administration – of “pushing back” asylum seekers over the border into Belarus. A number of Polish court rulings have deemed such actions unlawful.

However, in February this year, Hołownia toughened his position, saying that “we cannot accept people who illegally cross the border of Poland, who have no idea how to legalise their status, and whose intentions we have not verified”.

That same month, his party unanimously supported a government bill suspending the right of people who cross the Belarus border irregularly to claim asylum. It has also supported the extension of that asylum ban since then.

The asylum ban has been criticised by various human rights organisations, including the UNHCR, whose representative in Poland said that it violates international and European law.

After Hołownia’s announcement today, the head of Amnesty in Poland, Anna Błaszczak-Banasiak, tweeted that, given his support for the asylum ban, his decision was like someone guilty of defrauding pensioners applying to be director of a care home.

Poland has also won praise since 2022, including from the UN, for welcoming millions of refugees fleeing Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion, with almost one million remaining in the country today.


Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Mateusz Włodarczyk/MRPiPS (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

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