Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s parliamentary majority has voted to strip the leader of the opposition Conservatives (PiS) Jarosław Kaczyński of his legal immunity.
The move on December 6 means the PiS chief can face prosecutors over allegations he hit an activist called Zbigniew Komosa who had allegedly defamed late former-president Lech Kaczyński, Jarosław’s twin brother.
Komosa had claimed the ex-leader’s brother had caused the 2010 air crash killing 96 people, including the former president, near the Russian city of Smolensk.
Since the Smolensk air disaster of April 10 2010, Kaczyński and his PiS have held commemoration events on the tenth day of every month. The aircraft that crashed was carrying passengers en route to an event marking the Katyn massacre of Polish officers during the Second World War.
Both the Russian and the then-Tusk government’s investigations blamed pilot error in attempting a landing in poor visibility for the crash. Kaczyński and the PiS held a separate investigation, which claimed that the incident may have been caused by an explosion onboard.
No investigation has cited Lech Kaczynski as being in any way involved in getting the plane to try to land in Smolensk, yet some activists linked to the current Tusk majority have for years claimed that he had forced the pilot to try to touch down there.
Among those activists has been Komosa who, until recently, had been attending the PiS commemorations to protest with a wreath carrying a plaque claiming that the late-Kaczynski was responsible for the crash and the death of all the passengers.
The wreaths placed by Komosa included an inscription reading: “To the memory of the 95 victims of Lech Kaczyński who, ignoring all procedures, ordered the pilots to land at Smolensk in extremely difficult conditions.”
In September this year, 75-year-old PiS chief Kaczyński allegedly struck Komosa and the latter took the case to court in a private prosecution.
The PiS leader has said that striking out at Komosa was a reaction “to this man’s sense of impunity, that he could act as if no moral or legal rules applied to him”.
On the immunity ballot for the alleged assault, parliament had split along government-opposition lines in the chamber, with PiS and Confederation, another opposition right-wing party, voting against the lifting of the legal protection whereas the parties that make up the majority supporting the Tusk government voted in favour.
However, the ruling coalition parties split on the vote over prosecuting Kaczyński for removing the wreath and plaque on a charge of “destruction of property”. The Third Way Alliance, led by the Speaker of Parliament and presidential candidate in next year’s elections Szymon Hołownia, argued that it was too petty an alleged offence to justify the lifting of immunity.
As a result of the Third Way’s rebellion, Kaczynski retained his immunity from that charge. That evidently irritated Tusk who took to social media to state: “The law should apply equally to everyone,” adding: “Members of our coalition need to get themselves together or the voters will punish them.”
Since coming to power in December 2023, the PM and his Civic Coalition (KO) have made holding former PiS government officials to account, in their view, a top priority. Numerous prosecutions have been launched and parliamentary immunity has been lifted in several cases.
One such case involves former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro who, on December 5, had his immunity lifted so he could be forcibly brought before a parliamentary committee investigating the alleged use of Pegasus spyware. Pegasus is a spy system developed by Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group, designed to be covertly and remotely installed on mobile phones.
Ziobro, who only recently recovered from lengthy cancer treatment, has refused to attend the hearings because Poland’s Constitutional court has already deemed the formation of that committee to be illegal.
Despite that, Tusk’s government, which does not recognise the Constitutional court as being properly constituted, has proceeded with the investigation regardless.
