Maciej Wąsik lost a similar case to the Open Dialogue Foundation, but – contrary to the court’s judgement – he did not post an apology. Now it is time for the resigning Law and Justice (PiS) MEP Witold Waszczykowski to make a decision.
Failure to be re-elected in the 2024 European Parliament elections is not the only fiasco for former Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski in recent days. Just before the elections, a court judgement against him in a case brought by the Open Dialogue Foundation for violation of personal rights became final.
The Warsaw Regional Court has ordered the former foreign minister and PiS MEP to apologise to the Open Dialogue Foundation for statements made in 2019, in which he called it an “agent of Russian influence” and accused it of “anti-Polish activities”. The apology is to be posted on TVP Info and TV Republika.
The Law and Justice politician did not file an appeal against the court decision.
Witold Waszczykowski vs. the Open Dialogue Foundation
The case goes beyond these statements. For the full picture, one must go back to August 2017. On the initiative of Mariusz Kamiński, then coordinator of the secret services, Witold Waszykowski took action against the Foundation’s Management Board.
First, he failed to push through the suspension of the Foundation’s Management Board in court, and he then requested a fiscal audit. He also supported the decision of the Internal Security Agency (ABW) to ban the Foundation’s President Lyudmyla Kozlovska from entering Poland in 2018.
Recall that Lyudmyla was expelled from Poland and the European Union in August 2018 by the Polish authorities, who, based on information from the Internal Security Agency, considered her a threat to national security. In three subsequent rulings, in April and September 2019 and January 2021, the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw revoked the decision not to extend the stay in Poland and to expel Kozlovska, finding the documents on whose basis she was expelled to be “very vague”, “insufficient” and their conclusions “unreasonable”. On 5 December 2022, the Supreme Administrative Court overturned the last judgment in her case, which had not been in the activist’s favour – that is to say, the decision of the Governor of the Mazovian Voivodeship.
“Waszczykowski himself admitted in an interview with Radio Zet that Lyudmyla’s expulsion had been solely due to the publication of a Facebook article by her husband, Bartosz Kramek, in which he advocated civil disobedience in the face of the PiS attack on the rule of law,” reported Marcin Mycielski from the Open Dialogue Foundation.
The tax proceedings against the Foundation, on the other hand, are still pending today. The Foundation suspects a possible conflict of interest due to tax audits being conducted by the Customs and Tax Office in Łódź, which was headed by Witold Waszczykowski’s brother since January 2016.
Leading PiS politicians in the dock
On 10 October 2019, the Open Dialogue Foundation filed a total of 20 defamation lawsuits. Besides Witold Waszczykowski, the defendants also include Krystyna Pawłowicz, Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, Joachim Brudziński, Ryszard Czarnecki, Dominik Tarczyński, Patryk Jaki, Szymon Szynkowski vel Sęk, Tomasz Sakiewicz and TVP.
Previously, the case against Maciej Wąsik concluded with a final judgment. The court ordered him to apologise, but the Law and Justice politician did not post the apology. There have been no final judgments in the other cases yet. Bartosz Kramek, Chair of the Supervisory Board, told us that there are other judgments in favour of the Foundation, but that they are not yet final.
We asked Witold Waszczykowski whether he agreed with the judgment and whether he would post an apology. On Tuesday, 11 June, he informed us that he had not yet received the judgment, and that it was difficult for him to comment.
Source: lodz.wyborcza.pl