NGOs: Bodnar, look into political prosecutions

12.02.2024 18:00

More than 30 NGOs and more than 40 well-known personalities have signed an open public appeal to the Prosecutor General and Minister of Justice Adam Bodnar. They want a special team of prosecutors to analyse “politically motivated prosecutions” initiated against PiS opponents. They also demand the rehabilitation of wronged parties by a Public Prosecutor’s Office that has been politicised for years.

In an appeal entitled “Public appeal for review of politically motivated prosecutions from 2015 to 2023 and the rehabilitation of victims”, the signatories ask the minister “not to forget the numerous individual cases of abuse of power and trampling of human dignity by prosecutors carrying out political orders in the last eight years”. Because “political investigations” initiated under the United Right government are still ongoing, some of them dragging on for years, without indictment in court.

The politicisation of the Prosecutor’s Office led by Zbigniew Ziobro has already been reported on by the Venice Commission, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament and, most recently, the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. Therefore, the signatories of the appeal ask for an “effective review” of politically motivated cases, hoping that in the case of investigations that show a “reasonable suspicion of insufficient grounds for prosecution”, independent prosecutors will close them.

The authors mention that a similar scenario took place in Moldova after the fall of the oppressive regime of the oligarch and politician Vladimir Plahotniuc: the Prosecutor General closed nearly 40 criminal cases against critics of the previous government in May 2020.

“Victims of political persecution”

The appeal mentions reports by the Open Dialogue Foundation, the ObyPomoc group of the Citizens of Poland, the “PiS State” platform of the Paragraf-Państwo association, as well as studies by the Lex Super Omnia association and the Committee for the Defence of Justice. The authors cite a long list of politically persecuted people, pointing out that it is not exhaustive. Here are some examples:

civil activists, e.g. leaders of the All-Poland Women’s Strike (Marta Lempart – in the photo illustrating the article, Klementyna Suchanow and Agnieszka Czerederecka), refugee rescuers (e.g., Paweł and Justyna Wrabec from the Citizens of Poland), LGBT+ rights activists (e.g., Bart Staszewski), pro-democracy activists (e.g., Zbigniew Komosa, Katarzyna Augustynek, Elżbieta Podleśna), people detained during the Rainbow Night, or activists supporting migrants who as a sign of protest cut the barbed wires at the Polish–Belarusian border;
judges (e.g., Igor Tuleya, Waldemar Żurek) and prosecutors (e.g., Ewa Wrzosek, Katarzyna Kwiatkowska);
opposition politicians and local government officials (Roman Giertych, Tomasz Grodzki);
former heads and officers of the special services (Brigadier General Piotr Pytel, Paweł Wojtunik);
entrepreneurs and managers (Leszek Czarnecki, Jakub Karnowski);
journalists and writers (Tomasz Piątek, Jakub Żulczyk);
and “unfortunates” who have fallen foul of the PIS party by accident (Sebastian Kościelnik, who was involved in a traffic accident with Prime Minister Szydło’s motorcade).

Appoint a team of prosecutors

The authors of the appeal claim that the cases of these dozens of individuals involve “a number of worrying patterns and mechanisms, indicating the systemic dimension of the problem”, such as repetitive allegations without evidence or “allegations that defy common sense and logic”; abuses of special services; illegal surveillance; pre-trial proceedings lasting for years, detention prolonged to exert pressure on the detainee and repeated arrests on the same charges, etc. The list of these documented pathologies, indicative of political action by the prosecution, is also very long.

This “political persecution” meant that their victims not only had problems with the justice system and had their freedom restricted, but also suffered from a series of traumas. Members of their families were also affected by this. Their reputations were systematically destroyed by the Law and Justice propaganda media; some lost their jobs as a result.

The signatories request that Minister Bodnar appoint a team of prosecutors to analyse the rationale for a continuation of investigations initiated and conducted between 2015 and 2023, where it is suspected that the Prosecutor’s Office was a tool of political pressure. “We believe that such a decision would be a crucial step towards restoring public confidence in the Polish Prosecutor’s Office and the judiciary,” they argue.

The authors of the appeal suggest that the termination of such political investigations should be done by means of a “controversial” law … the so-called lex Obajtek. This is a provision amending the Code of Criminal Procedure so that a prosecutor can withdraw an indictment from the court at any stage of court proceedings. The changes were introduced at the start of the Law and Justice (PiS) rule in 2016 and came about in order to withdraw charges from criminal cases against Daniel Obajtek.

“Supporting wronged parties nationally”

The main signatory of the public appeal is former-President Lech Wałęsa. More than 40 other thought leaders supporting the appeal include people from the media (e.g., Krystyna Janda, Agnieszka Holland, Zbigniew Holdys), well-known professors from various fields (e.g., Leszek Balcerowicz, Andrzej Blikle), oppositionists from the times of the People’s Republic of Poland and PiS governments (e.g., Władysław Frasyniuk), people associated with activism (Janina Ochojska, Prof. Michał Dadlez) and a large group of publicly active lawyers (Hanna Machińska, Marcin Matczak, Wojciech Sadurski, Andrzej Zoll).

The appeal has also been signed so far by 33 NGOs, mainly involved in the defence of civil rights, the rule of law, migrants, LGBT+ people and anti-PiS activists. These include Action Democracy, Committee for the Defence of Democracy, Citizens of Poland, Mobile Brigade of the Opposition, and Homokomando Association.
The full text of the appeal and the list of signatories is available on the FB page of the Open Dialogue Foundation — the initiator and co-author of this appeal. It is an NGO that has been collecting, analysing and documenting cases of political persecution and abuse by Ziobro’s prosecution. “Once these cases were publicised in Strasbourg or Brussels, the natural next step for us was to support wronged parties nationally, once the Prosecutor’s Office has been freed from political influence,” explains Marcin Mycielski, vice-president of ODF and co-author of the appeal.

Source: oko.press

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