The European Parliament has voted to remove parliamentary immunity from Conservative (PiS) MEPs Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik so they can face criminal prosecution in Poland for an alleged failure to comply with a ban on holding public office.
Commenting on the decision Kamiński told Brussels Signal on April 1 that the EP did not assess the substantive content of the Polish Government’s submission and claimed that the charges brought against him were politically driven.
“The European Parliament has avoided making any substantive assessment of the charges made against me and my colleague. These charges are purely of a political nature,” he said.
“They demonstrate in the most vivid way possible how politicised the prosecution service has become under the rule of Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his justice minister Adam Bodnar.”
Kamiński accused the Tusk government of using prosecutions as a weapon in Poland’s ongoing presidential elections campaigns.
“I believe that Poland’s prosecution service has become directly engaged in the current election in order to defame the opposition and support the government’s line that PiS politicians [allegedly] committed criminal acts,” Kamiński said.
Since coming to power in late 2023 the Tusk administration has launched a wave of investigations and criminal indictments against officials from the previous PiS government for alleged abuses of power.
They have been widely publicised in the government-controlled public media and Liberal-leaning commercial media.
Kamiński and Wąsik were in 2015 found guilty of abusing their powers during a sting operation of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) during the PiS’ spell in government from 2005 to 2007.
Those convictions seemed to have been quashed shortly afterwards by a pardon from the PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda, even though the MEPs’ appeals against their sentencing had not yet been heard.
The President’s decision led a Polish court to challenge the validity of the his pardon. That resulted in the pair being convicted once again in 2023, sentenced to a term in prison and debarred from holding public office for five years.
Duda questioned that decision on constitutional grounds, arguing that the head of state’s power of pardon was absolute. The centre-left government led by Tusk chose to side with the court and jailed the two men in early 2024.
Kamiński and Wąsik, who were both MPs in the Polish parliament at the time, immediately went on hunger strike and, following appeals from their families and party colleagues, Duda pardoned the pair once again.
They were then released from prison and subsequently able to stand for election to the European Parliament in June 2024.
The Polish justice minister Adam Bodnar then decided the two should be prosecuted for having attended the Polish parliament’s sittings in 2023 after they had been convicted and debarred from office before they were pardoned.
Poland’s Supervisory Chamber of the Supreme Court had, though, ruled that the mandates of the two MPs were valid at the time.
That was a decision the Polish Government did not recognise as it does not accept the validity of judicial appointments made during the lifetime of the previous PiS government.
Bodnar’s request for the two MEPs’ parliamentary immunity to be lifted was finally granted by the EP with the majority of MEPs voting down the right-wing opposition, leaving the pair open to face criminal charges in Poland.
