Tag: political persecution

Unlawful surveillance at the hotels of Polish Hotel Holding (PHH) is being investigated. According to reports by Gazeta Wyborcza, the president of PHH allegedly passed information to Joachim Brudziński, a Law and Justice MP, about a meeting of politicians of the then-opposition in one of the hotels managed by the holding. The name of Maciej […]

“For eight years PiS has been ruining the lives of people defending the rule of law in Poland. If we want to talk about democratic change, there must be accountability,” say Lyudmyla Kozlovska and Bartosz Kramek from the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF). They are calling for a commission of inquiry into the matter.  The Open […]

Marat Danebayev – is a brother of a prominent Kazakhstani political prisoner Timur Danebayev. Marat Danebayev faced the risk of politically motivated persecution in Kazakhstan because he publicly covering the facts of ongoing repression against his brother, who is not receiving necessary medical care and is being held in unacceptable conditions. Marat was forced to […]

In an unprecedented manner, the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw ordered the Head of the Office for Foreigners to remove Lyudmyla Kozlovska’s entry ban as unjustified. There is no record of Polish courts ever ordering the Head to remove an entry ban. The verdict dated 28 November 2023 was delivered to us on 18 December […]

Ukrainian activist Lyudmyla Kozlovska, President of the Open Dialogue Foundation and wife of Bartosz Kramek, is again allowed to enter Poland. The ban lasted more than five years. Last year on 13 December, the Voivodeship Administrative Court in Warsaw issued a judgement ordering the Head of the Office for Foreigners to immediately remove Lyudmyla Kozlovska […]

The Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw has ordered the Office for Foreigners to remove the President of the Open Dialogue Foundation, Lyudmyla Kozlovska, from the register of foreigners whose residence on the territory of Poland is undesirable. “From our point of view, this is a precedent-setting ruling. For the first time, the court has not […]

Last year, on 13 December, the Voivodeship Administrative Court (WSA) in Warsaw ordered the Office for Foreigners to remove Lyudmyla Kozlovska from the list of undesirable people in Poland. “In 2018, after many years of residency, I was banned from entering Poland upon a  private request of Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik who controlled the […]

After almost six years of legal battles, the Voivodeship Administrative Court (VAC) ordered that the pro-democracy activist and President of the Open Dialogue Foundation be removed from the list of people not allowed into Poland. Services subordinate to the Law and Justice party considered her a threat to Poland after ODF objected to the politicisation […]

On 8 December 2023, the President of the Open Dialogue Foundation participated in the panel discussion “Regulation as an Opportunity” at the Digital Finance Summit in Brussels. Lyudmyla Kozlovska gave a presentation on the consequences of the misuse of anti-money-laundering and counter-terrorist financing regulations. The event, moderated by journalist Jimmy Franklin and Toon Vanagt, CEO […]

Russia is threatened with exclusion from the international system of combating money laundering. The issue of Russia’s inclusion on the blacklist of the organisation in question – the FATF (Financial Action Task Force) – was considered at Ukraine’s request at a recent FATF session. The decision has not yet been made, but it may be […]

On 20 October 2023, the Vice-President & Executive Director of the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF) Martin Mycielski and Chair of the Supervisory Board Bartosz Kramek were hosted by member of the State Tribunal, lawyer, and attorney Jacek Dubois in an interview entitled “Rachunek za prokuratora” (“Footing the bill for a prosecutor”).  In this hour-long interview, they […]

Lyudmyla Kozlovska, President of the Open Dialogue Foundation (ODF), participated in the Bitcoin Amsterdam Conference, which took place from 12 to 14 October 2023. During the panel discussion at the conference Bitcoin is borderless, she shared her story of how Bitcoin allowed her to fight for human rights, help Ukraine during the war, and deal […]

The Law and Justice (PiS) Party and Ziobro arm themselves to strike fear into entrepreneurs; to strike them not with a stick, but with a truncheon. Michał Romanowski – Professor of commercial law, Warsaw University. Attorney-at-Law at the Romanowski i Wspólnicy Law Office. In a recent interview with Forbes, Arkadiusz Muś, one of Poland’s most […]

Like every year, ODF took an active part in the OSCE’s Warsaw Human Dimension Conference. Unlike in 2022 we didn’t just focus the assembly’s attention on rule of law challenges in Poland, but also presented our findings on financial exclusion stemming from the abuse of AML/CFT laws by authoritarian states. The Warsaw Human Dimension Conference […]

The Open Dialogue Foundation and the “Themis” Association of Judges have published a report outlining how the Polish public prosecutor’s office operated under the rule of Zbigniew Ziobro. Entrepreneurs speak out about harassment by investigators. The report features a number of stories of people who experienced repression by the public prosecutor’s office in Poland under […]