The Polish justice ministry has published guidelines on hate-motivated crimes recommending close examination of online activity, including visual content such as memes.
The guidelines for prosecutors announced on April 3 include provisions for creating a group of prosecutors specialising in pursuing “hateful acts”. They will examine content to spot “intolerant views and attitudes”, with special reference to those expressed against minority groups. They will also conduct searches of email inboxes and seize electronic devices belonging to those suspected of posting “criminal content” in public spaces.
The features to be protected by the guidelines include race, nationality, affiliation or ethnicity and religion as well as sexual orientation and gender identity – despite the absence of such grounds in the penal code.
Former Polish Conservative (PiS) prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki slammed them as overbearing.
“We need to sound the alarm — soon, perhaps right after the presidential election, we might wake up in a reality where Orwellian thoughtcrime becomes a provision in the criminal code, not just a work of fiction” he said on social media.
Morawiecki added that humorous memes were in danger from a law that threatened to reintroduce censorship through the backdoor to Poland.
“Could someone really face criminal charges or even jail time over a meme? It may sound absurd but for all the internet jokesters who value freedom of expression, it’s no laughing matter,” he argued.
The guidelines have been interpreted as a preemptive measure by the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk signalling to the opposition Conservatives (PiS)-aligned President Andrzej Duda that the ruling majority would side-step a likely presidential veto to legislation passed by parliament in March.
Duda has said he did not support and was likely to veto that legislation aimed at broadening the definition of hate crimes because he perceived it to be a threat to freedom of speech.
Conservatives have been urging the President to veto the legislation as they feared a repetition of situations witnessed in other countries where freedom of expression had been challenged. They also said they believed the law would contradict the principle of equal treatment by favouring selected groups over other citizens.
The Conservative legal think-tank Ordo Iuris has argued that special provisions against hate speech were unnecessary because “there are currently a number of criminal and non-criminal measures already protecting everyone, regardless of any particular characteristic or form of self-identification, from violence, incitement to violence, threats, insults, and defamation”.
