A Polish family has been forcibly separated from their children as a result of a political decision taken by the current centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk to side with foreign social service organisations in disputes.
The family in question was separated from their children who were handed over to the Swedish authorities in July last year as part of Poland following European Union law to the letter.
In July 2024, Swedish officials, acting with the consent of a Polish court and the Polish Government, took the Klaman family’s daughters away on Polish territory and transported them to Sweden.
Since then, the Polish children have had no contact with their biological family, live with Swedish foster families who do not speak Polish, and are separated from each other.
The case began back in Sweden when the Swedish authorities took the eldest of the four Klaman daughters away from her parents.
The reason was that the girl (as she herself admitted) lied to the school counsellor, claiming that her parents were abusing her when in reality she had been made to do light housework, such as emptying the dishwasher or walking the dog.
The parents then went back to Poland with their three remaining daughters but the Swedish authorities filed for the children to be taken away and placed in foster care in Sweden.
The Polish authorities agreed despite a positive report on the Klaman family issued by a Polish probation officer.
At the end of June 2024, the children were taken from their parents with the assistance of the Polish police and, at the beginning of July, they were sent back to Sweden and placed with three different foster families.
“My children have been separated from each other in a foreign country for a year; they have no contact with each other. They are forgetting their native language, and the social services no longer respond to emails,” complained Robert Klaman, the father of the girls.
Notified by the girls’ parents after their removal to Sweden, lawyers from the conservative Ordo Iuris Institute have been pressing to ensure that until proceedings concerning the parental rights are concluded the children are placed with a foster family related to the family and living in Poland . They also urged the justice ministry to take up the case with the Swedish authorities for the return of the children to Poland.
The justice ministry, though, refused to disclose full information on the case and therefore Ordo Iuris had to go to court to obtain it.
In July of this year, a district court in Warsaw ruled that Ordo Iuris was entitled to the information about the details of a meeting on family protection held in February last year to examine the response of the Polish State for cases brought by the Norwegian Barnevernet, Swedish social services, or the German Jugendamt. That is a German and Austrian government agency responsible for child and youth welfare.
The judgment, which was made public on August 7, has granted Ordo Iuris access to the ministry’s documents about a meeting at which deputy labour minister Zuzanna Rudzińska-Bluszcz assured European Union ambassadors in Poland that her country would no longer be a refuge for families fleeing abuse by social services.
According to Ordo Iuris lawyer Bartosz Lewandowski this was a return to the way matters were handled by the previous Tusk government before the Conservative PiS came into office in 2015.
“That’s how it used to work. I remember before 2015. There were even bizarre situations where officials from other countries came to Poland without any court ruling,” said Lewandowski.
They simply showed their ID and obtained the consent of the Polish authorities, or the consent of Polish institutions, such as social services, to take the child away.”
During the lifetime of the PiS government. the justice ministry led by Zbigniew Ziobro had made it a priority to seek to unite families and to protect Poles from losing their children as a result of proceedings brought forward by Scandinavian and German social service agencies.
