Defamation case win against Wąsik. Court hands down final judgement

23 February 2024 | Author: Natalia Melnychenko

On 23 February 2024, the Court of Appeal in Warsaw ruled that former Deputy Head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration (MSWiA) Maciej Wąsik infringed the personal rights of the Open Dialogue Foundation and its heads Lyudmyla Kozlovska and Bartosz Kramek. He must publish an apology for the statements he made in 2018-2019, on TVP Info, Telewizja Republika and in Gazeta Polska Codziennie.

Thus, the court 100% upheld the ruling of the court of first instance, declaring Maciej Wąsik’s appeal unfounded. The judgement is final, although Wąsik still has the right to file a cassation appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Law and Justice (PiS) politician accused us of, among other things, having connections with Russia, money laundering and hybrid activities. He also accused Bartosz Kramek, the Chair of the Supervisory Board of the Foundation, of “publicly calling for bloodshed”, referring to his social media post entitled “Let the state come to a stop: let’s shut down the government!” posted during the high point of protests in defence of an independent judiciary in Poland in the summer of 2017.

“There are many indications that the Open Dialogue Foundation was too open to funding from untransparent sources,” said Wąsik in 2018 to the Gazeta Polska Codziennie daily. In 2019, during an interview for TVP Info, he argued that the Foundation “is suspicious”, “It was being said, ear-to-ear or quietly in the corridors, that the sources of their funding are concealed, their work posed a threat in various parts of Europe. (…) I’d dare to say that this foundation could be called hybrid.”

In 2022, the District Court of Warsaw ruled that Wąsik was obliged to pay damages of PLN 10 thousand respectively in favour of the Foundation, Bartosz Kramek and Lyudmyla Kozlovska. This step was intended to compensate for the moral and reputational damage caused by the unfounded accusations. The Court of Appeal fully supported the decision and crushed all the arguments of the Law and Justice politician’s defence counsel, including claims that defamatory statements were only legitimate opinions, that they were of a social nature or that they were selectively chosen. “For obvious reasons”, the court also did not accept Wąsik’s explanation that in 2019, when claiming that proceedings were pending against Bartosz Kramek, he was referring to allegations the latter heard in…2021. Similarly, the court did not acknowledge the arguments about the defendant’s poor financial status (“he performed certain functions, associated with a certain level of income, he also received an MP’s allowance”), nor that the judgement had taken him by surprise (“this circumstance was not unforeseeable” as five years had passed since the act.

“The final judgement comes more than four years after the lawsuit was filed and more than five years after Maciej Wąsik’s first defamatory statements against us. As the court already noted in the first instance, Wąsik used defamation to further the political interests of his own party. During the previous court hearings, he tried to soften the tenor of his words and mentioned memory fallibility. Earlier on, he had referred to secret documents of the Internal Security Agency and backed his statements with libellous publications of government-supporting ‘media’, that were supposed to justify my wife’s expulsion from Poland, all while ignoring the fact that the ‘findings’ of his secret services had been repeatedly refuted by courts and considered unreliable by other EU states,” Bartosz Kramek commented.

As always, we would like to thank the reliable law firm “Lach Janas Biernat”, especially attorneys Dawid Biernat and Maciej Lach for their effective representation.

Read also:

Maciej Wąsik loses libel case over Foundation’s ‘ties to Russia’ claim. Court ordered apologies (August 5, 2022)

In the media:

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