‘In the process of prosecuting Bartosz Kramek for his call for civil disobedience against the Law and Justice’s authorities, the prosecution service supervised by Mr Ziobro has gone so far as to commission a professional semiotic study. However, nowhere in the entire text is there any suggestion of overthrowing the government’– the author said clearly.
The Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin discontinued its investigation against the Open Dialogue Foundation’s activist, due to the absence of the ‘essential elements of the offence’.
This move was prefaced by 7 years of searching for evidence to corroborate more and more allegation, the compilation of 52 volumes of files totalling more than 10,000 pages, the involvement of the Internal Security Agency, arrests, daily police surveillance, attacks in the mass media, allegations of ‘money laundering’ and links to Russia.
Prosecutors were even trying to prove that the ODF was shipping faulty bulletproof vests and helmets to Ukraine. Meanwhile, the ‘’semiotic and cultural ‘’ analysis commissioned by the prosecutors, on the other hand, was to verify whether the activist had allegedly called for a … coup d’état.
It all started with the famous manifesto voiced by Bartosz Kramek – Chairman of the Board of the Open Dialog Foundation – ‘Let the State Come to a Stop: Let’s Shut Down the Government’. The appeal was posted in July 2017 at a time of protests against the politicisation of the courts by the Law and Justice. In his appeal, Kramek sharply criticised the government and called for civil disobedience.
In their response to this move, the state authorities first raided the Foundation with a series of inspections and attempted to take it over. Yet, when these efforts proved fruitless, an investigation was launched in September 2017 ‘for inciting the public to commit a crime’, as in his appeal, Kramek allegedly instigated a coup.
A year later, on the basis of false allegations, the services controlled by the Law and Justice, expelled his wife, Lyudmila Kozlovska, the head of the Open Dialogue Foundation, a Ukrainian, and long-term resident of Poland, from the country. Meanwhile, party politicians and propagandists appearing on the media accused the activist couple of money laundering, links to Moscow and anti-Polish acts.
The prosecutors in charge of the investigation also tried to charge them with ‘acting to the detriment of the Warsaw-Śródmieście District.’ Indeed, the activists used the premises where the ODF ran a support centre for Ukrainian refugees free of charge.
Meanwhile, Kramek faced additional charges of acting to the detriment of his own company, Silk Road. The allegation was that Kramek used the corporate funds to support the Foundation which helped Ukrainians in Poland.
The Law and Justice’s decision-makers were so determined to prosecute Kramek and the ODF that in 2018 the tasks of the police in this investigation were taken over by the Internal Security Agency. This happened on the instruction of Bogdan Święczkowski – then the State Prosecutor and, for several days now, the successor of Julia Przyłębska at the position of President of the Constitutional Tribunal.
‘They were trying to dig up some dirt’
In 2021 Kramek was detained by the Internal Security Agency and charged with providing false representations on VAT invoices issued by the Silk Road at the amount of PLN 5.3 million. The invoices had allegedly been issued without providing any services.
He was also charged with money-laundering and arrested for three weeks. He was released from custody after his friends and relatives posted bail in the amount of PLN 300,000.
Kramek was obliged to report daily at the police station. ‘Such a highly radical and severe form of control is applied to, for example, perpetrators of domestic violence – to monitor them and make it more difficult for them to abuse their families,’ – Kramek points out in his interview with OKO.press. At the court hearing revoking this supervision, the prosecutor openly admitted that it had been imposed ‘on the personal instruction of the General Prosecutor’, Mr Zbigniew Ziobro.
The investigation has been transferred from one prosecutor to the next. Apart from the above-mentioned prosecutor Święczkowski, it was also supervised by Jerzy Ziarkiewicz, Ziobro’s favourite, in whose garage after the fall of the ‘good change’ the files of dozens of cases inconvenient for the Law and Justice were found. Ziarkiewicz used to obstruct these proceedings.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Open Dialogue Foundation immediately began sending vitally needed equipment on the spot, like bulletproof vests and helmets. Presumably the ODF was the organisation that, compared to other Polish entities, sent the largest numbers of such items i.e. ca. 5,000 vests and ca. 1,000 helmets.
The first batch of such equipment was delivered by the ODF to the Ukrainian embassy just 2 days after the war broke out. Then prosecutor Ziarkiewicz personally wrote a letter to the Ukrainian ambassador. He expected the diplomat to confirm that the ODF had provided them with defective equipment. ‘There were doubts as regards the parameters and defence value of the purchased bulletproof vests, including as to the class of ballistic resistance,’ Ziarkiewicz wrote.
However, the Ambassador did not confirm any of these ‘doubts’.
The prosecution service also took an interest in ‘illegal asset bail fundraising’. The aforementioned 19 family members and friends (including Wojciech Czuchnowski, an investigative journalist from Gazeta Wyborcza) raised a total of PLN 300,000 to get Kramek out of custody.
Well, it was another miss.
‘They were just trying to dig up some dirt’ – commented Kramek.
‘No procedural ability to identify a concrete criminal act’
On 6 February 2024, i.e. almost 7 years after Kramek’s call, prosecutor Marcin Kołodziejczyk of the District Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin finally discontinued the investigation into the activist’s alleged public incitement to commit a crime, which had been prolonged several times before.
In order to convince himself that Kramek was not calling for a ‘coup d’état’ or ‘overthrowing the government by force’, the prosecutor had to interrogate many people. And he commissioned a special analysis (more on that later).
It was not until 10 December 2024 that the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin announced that the entire investigation against Kramek had been discontinued. ‘The evidence gathered after the charges were presented as part of the verification of Bartosz K.’s line of defence makes it plausible that the version of events presented by him, that the services indicated in the invoices issued by him between 2012 and 2015, could have actually been performed’ – says the Spokesman for the Public Prosecutor’s Office, Beata Syk-Jankowska in her statement.
The Spokesman has also clarified that the funds Kramek received into the account did not come from the crime of misrepresentation, and that there is ‘no procedural ability to identify a concrete criminal act’.
‘The state ruled by the Law and Justice tried to destroy the unruly’
Kramek also comments on the discontinuation of the investigation on Platform X in this way: ‘This investigation was conducted in bad faith on a political order coming from the top level of the authorities at the time. It is high time that those guilty of abuses in the prosecutor’s office and the secret services bear full responsibility’.
In his interview with OKO.press, he stresses that the investigation has caused huge problems for the Foundation – including the closure of their banking accounts Belgium and frightening their donors. Lyudmyla Kozłowska, head of the ODF, expects an end to the ‘numerous trailing tax inspections that were initiated against the Foundation in 2017 on the orders of Mariusz Kamiński and Witold Waszczykowski’
‘This is how the Law and Justice’s state, like any other regime that cannot stand criticism, sought to destroy the unruly’ – comments on the investigation history Marcin Mycielski, ODF Vice President and Executive Director at the ODF.
Praise rather than punishment
In search of arguments to prove the charge of public incitement to a crime i.e. overthrowing the government, in January 2021, i.e. 3.5 years after Kramek’s famous appeal, prosecutor Kolodziejczyk commissioned a semiotic-cultural analysis of the text of this manifesto. Instead of the expected evidence, he received the exact opposite – expressions of considerable appreciation for Kramek’s manifesto, along with a scholarly backing.
The 15-page analysis was drawn up by Dr Małgorzata Lisowska-Magdziarz of the Institute of Media Journalism and Social Communication at Jagiellonian University.
The researcher analysed Kramek’s text using the ‘tools of critical discourse analysis’. Thus, we initially have here academic reflections of what constitutes public discourse, of ‘norms of communicative behaviour’, and of how the discussion of journalists and academics differs from the ‘everyday conversations of Smiths’.
The analysis of Kramek’s text was conducted in ‘connection with the general expectations of the legitimacy, constructiveness and friendliness of discourse positioned in the common space, and the norms of online, social discourse, on the basis of the customary use of media in a participatory way,’ it reads.
After an extremely powerful academic intro, the researcher moved on to the core of the matter. She writes that Kramek’s appeal is ‘characterised by low rhetoric and calmness’, ‘emotional moderation’, and that it fits ‘into the norms and rules of political and civic social communication on the internet’. It also notes that the author is not hiding and so ‘expresses a willingness to face possible consequences.
The researcher repeatedly emphasises that Kramek ‘does not exceed any norms or taboos’ and that his assessments are ‘commonly expressed in the media’. The activist’s manifesto is ‘a representation of modern discourse’ and ‘civil society’, ‘modern politics (…) practised peacefully within the framework of a democratic state’, and its posting online ‘even seeks to reinforce civic and democratic values’, praises the Jagiellonian University researcher.
After a dozen pages of such deliberations, a key statement falls: ‘Nowhere in the entire text does the author suggest that the government be overthrown’.
Dr Lisowska-Magdziarz also emphasises that Kramek even calls for peaceful action, free of violence and force – something that the prosecutor himself could easily have read from the appeal, which has been posted on Facebook in an unchanged form for years.
But he has not read it.
How much did this analysis and the entire 7-year investigation, with a file of over 10,000 pages, cost the Polish taxpayer? We will ask this question of the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Lublin.
Nine successful lawsuits against the Law and Justice’s politicians and propagandists
The Open Dialogue Foundation initiated an appeal which was supported more than 30 NGOs and more than 40 opinion leaders for verification of politically-motivated prosecution proceedings.
A panel of prosecutors has been working on this issue for four months. For there are many more cases like that of Kramek – for the time being ‘several hundred’ of them are being analysed, 200 nationwide to start with.
Bartosz Kramek expects the prosecution service to keep up the momentum and discontinue more politically-motivated cases. He lists by name the business people concerned (Piotr Osiecki, Przemysław Krych, Leszek Czarnecki, Tomasz Misiak, Rafał Markiewicz, Maciej Bodnar and Michał Lubiński).
‘We await the results of the audit conducted by the State Prosecution Service and a full disclosure of the behind-the-scenes activities of prosecutors such as Jerzy Ziarkiewicz, Artur Maludy, Jakub Romelczyk and their subordinates,’ concludes Kramek.
The couple heading the ODF have brought 20 lawsuits against the Law and Justice’s politicians and propagandists who slandered them in the mass media. So far, the activists have won as many as nine lawsuits for violation of personal rights, in most of which the judgements are not yet final. Those who lost the lawsuits included, among others, Joachim Brudziński, Patryk Jaki, Dominik Tarczyński, Maciej Wąsik, Tomasz Sakiewicz.
Source: oko.press
Read also:
In other media:
- Gazeta Wyborcza: Years of Ziarkiewicz-led lawfare against Kramek. ‘No grounds for prosecution’ (December 10, 2024)
- TVN24: Discontinuation of the investigation against the Chair of the ODF Supervisory Board (December 10, 2024)
- Polskie Radio Lublin: Lublin: Discontinuation of the investigation against the Chair of the Board (December 10, 2024)
- TOK FM: The services are focused on ODF. “Let’s dig up some dirt on Kramek” (December 6, 2024)