There is, in a decent state, a line that must never be crossed: the machinery of justice – the courts, the police, the prosecution service, the lifting of immunities – must never become a tool of political gamesmanship. This is not just another partisan game, it is the foundation on which the state rests. And let me say at once the thing that matters most to me. That line is uncrossable no matter which side happens to be doing the locking up, and which side is being locked up.
The Patryk Jaki case, or the day the internet caught fire.
In early June, the minister of justice and concurrently Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek submitted to the European Parliament a motion seeking consent to hold Member of the European Parliament Patryk Jaki criminally liable, to detain him and bring him in by force. The prosecution claims that, as the deputy minister overseeing the prison system, he is alleged to have exceeded his powers and unlawfully influenced the career of one of the Prison Service officers. I stress this clearly, because it is too often forgotten. For now we have a motion and a suspicion, not a verdict, and the MEP, like every one of us, is covered by the presumption of innocence.
And I have no intention of defending the act he is accused of. If anyone, from any camp, broke the law for a friend, they should stand before an independent court and hear a verdict. What troubles me is something else, namely the manner, the pace and the political staging in which such cases are conducted today. Because all too easily the justice system is turned into the stage of pre-election theatre.
No matter which side does the locking up.
I say this with a clear conscience, because I built my credibility on this particular matter in the days when, under the previous government, Włodzimierz Karpiński, a Civic Platform (PO) politician, was held in detention for nearly nine months. At the time I was one of the few on the right who protested loudly. Not in defence of his possible guilt, for that was to be decided by an independent court, but against the method itself. Because holding a man in a cell for months, before any verdict has even been handed down, is not the administration of justice. It is the exertion of pressure.
And this, too, must be called by its name. Detention for the purpose of extracting testimony is a term you will search for in vain in the code, yet it describes a real pathology, namely prolonged pre-trial detention applied not because the case requires it, but in order to break a person and force a confession. The European Court of Human Rights has repeatedly condemned Poland for the excessive length of such detentions, and the figures are merciless. The number of people held for more than two years while still at the investigation stage has risen from two cases in 2014 to several dozen in recent years, and Polish courts grant roughly nine out of ten prosecution motions for detention. This is not the problem of one party. It is a disease of the system, which every successive government gladly exploits the moment it is handed the keys.
I am going to use strong words, because that is exactly how I feel about it.
I have the impression that, in the area of the justice system, Poland in many respects is beginning to resemble Russia. I flag this at once: I say it as a deliberately uncomfortable warning, not a literal comparison, because the difference is fundamental and must not be blurred. Poland is a state of the European Union and of the Council of Europe, subject to the rulings of the tribunals in Strasbourg and Luxembourg. It is that Court in Strasbourg which, as recently as May, intervened in our dispute over the Constitutional Tribunal. It is a country with free elections that genuinely change those in power, and with a free press that, unfortunately, does not write too loudly about all of this. Russia is not subject to such conditions. What worries me, however, is the direction and the temptation. A prosecution service still fused with a political minister, pre-trial detention abused beyond all measure, the Constitutional Tribunal first appropriated and now openly disregarded, as the government refuses to publish several dozen of its rulings. Under the previous government and under the current one alike. I am naming this trajectory for what it is.
Not the victor's spoils
Because what frightens me most is not this or that case, but where we have arrived as a community. I recently returned to the much-discussed report by the sociologists Przemysław Sadura and Sławomir Sierakowski on the political cynicism of Poles, and its diagnosis robs you of any peace. We have fractured into two impermeable bubbles that have stopped seeing a shared reality and look at each other solely with contempt. In such a climate, detaining an opponent stops being a scandal and starts being a trophy. And that is precisely when all my red lights start flashing, because I truly cannot stand the political game in which it is ordinary people who suffer.
In the end it all comes down to a single question. Are we still capable of defending the principle that the justice system is not the spoils of the victor. Because if we are not, then every successive election will only change who sits in the cell, not how the state is governed. That is why my appeal is simple and not at all naive. Let us not stoke yet more collisions, but instead puncture those bubbles. Every week I myself sit down to talk with people from whom I am separated by years of disputes and serious differences of view, and every time it turns out that you can talk, you can respect one another, indeed you can even like one another. This is not weakness. It is the only way I know to turn two hostile tribes into one nation, and to return detention to where it belongs, namely under the control of an independent court, and not under the dictates of current politics.
In this text I draw on the Prosecutor General's motion to the European Parliament from early June of this year concerning the immunity of MEP Patryk Jaki, on the case law of the European Court of Human Rights regarding the excessive length of pre-trial detention in Poland, and on reports by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, on publicly available data on the use of pre-trial detention, on the case of Włodzimierz Karpiński, on the report by Przemysław Sadura and Sławomir Sierakowski „Polityczny cynizm Polaków” (The Political Cynicism of Poles), as well as on current reports about the dispute surrounding the Constitutional Tribunal and about the proceedings against politicians of the previous governing camp. All persons named are covered by the presumption of innocence.
