A Warsaw court has sanctioned the pre-trial detention of Zbigniew Ziobro, a former Polish justice minister in the last Conservative (PiS) government.
The decision yesterday paves the way for a European arrest warrant to be issued against Ziobro who, since October last year, has been living in Hungary where he has been granted asylum by the Hungarian Government.
Polish public prosecutors have charged Ziobro with committing 26 offences when he was justice minister in the last PiS administration, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023.
The charges levied at the former minister include him allegedly leading an organised group of ministry officials, which it is claimed misused €35 million worth of public money from the Justice Fund, a financial vehicle for assisting victims of crime as well as the prevention of crime.
Ziobro and his colleagues are alleged to have illegally channelled the fund to allied conservative organisations as well as using it to purchase the Pegasus spyware, which it is claimed was used to monitor political opponents of the PiS government.
The court decided to issue a warrant for Ziobro to be detained for a three month period. The National Prosecutor’s office claims that confirms the evidence gathered during the investigation “indicates the high likelihood that the suspect [Ziobro] committed 26 crimes”.
Ziobro’s defence attorney Bartosz Lewandowski, though, noted that the court did not assess Ziobro’s guilt or the strength of the evidence at this stage. Another of the former ministers attorneys, Adam Gomoła, said his client would be appealing the decision to a higher court.
Ziobro was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in November, clearing the way for prosecutors to formally charge him and seek his detention.
The court justified its order for Ziobro’s arrest, stating that there was a “risk on the part of the suspect of fleeing, going into hiding and unlawfully influencing the further course of the proceedings”.
But the former minister, who is currently a PiS MP in the Polish parliament, did not attend either the parliamentary nor the court hearings. That is because, since October, he has been living in Hungary where he was granted asylum on the grounds that he would not be able to face a fair trial in Poland.
Poland’s prosecution service has announced that the next stage of proceedings following the court’s decision on Ziobro’s detention will be the initiation of a search for Ziobro by filing for a European arrest warrant.
Such a warrant, though, will not be applicable in Hungary since that country, early in the New Year, legislated to deny any extraditions on such warrants in cases where asylum has been granted.
Ziobro denies any wrongdoing and says the probes are politically motivated since the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has publicly declared it is pursuing PiS politicians to “restore the rule of law” and hold former officials accountable.
Reacting to the court proceedings against him, Ziobro told independent broadcaster TV Republika that the case bears the hallmarks of a “show trial”. He said he he finds it galling, given he says he has “spent all my adult life pursuing mafias and improving public safety”.
Ziobro alleged that the judge presiding over his case was “an activist judge who is a member of Iustitia, an organisation which has made campaigning against me its priority”.
“This is why I attempted to have her removed from the bench from my case but she has refused to give way,” he said.
There has been a raft of indictments against former PiS state officials issued by prosecutors, including one against former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki. That was over his role in attempting to organise a postal ballot during the presidential election that was held during the Covid pandemic in 2020.
The opposition PiS has called the government’s campaign a “witchhunt”. It has pointed to decisions taken by the justice minister such as the ending of the practice of random assigning of cases to judges and attempting to purge judges appointed during the lifetime of the past PiS government as evidence of the politically partisan nature of the Tusk administration’s moves.
