An open letter by Minister Adam Bodnar was published on the website of the Ministry of Justice on Thursday. It reads that the Minister “fully shares the conviction of the need for an effective review and analysis of cases where there is any suspicion that they may have been politically motivated”.
In an open letter published on the website of Ministry of Justice on Thursday in response to a call for a review of “politically motivated prosecutions between 2015 and 2023”, Minister of Justice Prosecutor General Adam Bodnar asserted that he “fully shares the conviction of the need for an effective review and analysis of cases where there is any suspicion that they may have been politically motivated”.
On Monday, a public appeal to Minister Bodnar was published on the website of the Open Dialogue Foundation. The signatories include the former President of the Republic of Poland Lech Wałęsa and over a dozen foundations, associations and non-governmental organisations, including the Open Dialogue Foundation, Citizens of Poland, the All-Poland Women’s Strike, Border Group and Themis Judges Association. Other signatories include Leszek Balcerowicz, Agnieszka Holland, Zbigniew Hołdys, Tomasz Lis, Janina Ochojska and Andrzej Zoll.
“As citizens of the Republic of Poland, supporting the victims of the arbitrary and highly questionable actions of the Public Prosecutor’s Office led by your predecessor, Zbigniew Ziobro, we would like to address you with concern and alarm regarding the still ongoing political investigations initiated between 2015 and 2023, under the United Right government,” reads the appeal.
Its authors requested, among other things, that there be appointed “a team of prosecutors to analyse the rationale for continuing investigations initiated and conducted between 2015 and 2023 in which there is a highly justified suspicion that the Prosecutor’s Office was being used as a political tool to intimidate, harass and falsely accuse a number of people of not-committed or highly questionable offences, purely because, for various reasons, they had become inconvenient to the previous ruling camp”.
Minister’s response: “I fully share the conviction”
“The issue raised in the appeal is extremely significant and is one of the priorities of my mission as Prosecutor General of the Republic of Poland. I fully share the conviction that there is a need for an effective review and analysis of cases where there is any suspicion that they may have been politically motivated. This applies to the cases listed in the appeal addressed to me, although, as you have noted, this list isn’t complete,” wrote the Minister of Justice.
Minister Bodnar emphasised that conducting such an analysis is “a time-consuming challenge and requires the involvement of many prosecutors at different levels. The reason for this is the numerous and contradictory actions taken by the Public Prosecutor’s Office against various social groups and individuals during the eight years that the United Right politicians were in power.”
“We are talking about both proceedings aimed at restricting the freedom of action or stopping the activity of social activists and NGO leaders, as well as attempts to repress representatives of excluded groups. I mean representatives of the LGBTQ+ community, organisers of Equality Marches, representatives of ethnic or national minorities, or the many people and organisations supporting refugees on the Polish-Belarusian border,” states the Minister in the letter.
The Minister is of the opinion that the process of verifying the cases raised in the appeal should be carried out in a “dispersed manner, in view of the aforementioned diversity of the subject matter of the proceedings, their number, as well as their local jurisdiction. The actions of the prosecutors will, of course, be subject to control in accordance with the applicable legal standards, but the model of centralised control over the work of investigators, which was usually characteristic of the previous government, will not be practised,” emphasised the minister.
Source: onet.pl
In other media:
- TVN24: Minister Bodnar supports review of “politically motivated prosecutions” (February 16, 2024)
- Rzeczpospolita: Bodnar’s open letter to Wałęsa on investigations from PiS days (February 16, 2024)
- Forsal: Bodnar responds to ‘politically motivated prosecutions’ (February 16, 2024)
- PAP: Minister Bodnar responds to authors of public appeal (February 15, 2024)
- Interia: Bodnar writes to Wałęsa. Announced “review of political proceedings” (February 15, 2024)
