The European Parliament (EP) has voted to lift the immunity of four opposition Polish MEPs following requests from Poland’s prosecution service, which is controlled by the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
The move follows recommendations from the EP’s legal affairs committee, which said the cases were criminal in nature and not politically motivated.
The decision clears the way for Polish prosecutors and courts to pursue legal proceedings against the MEPs. Parliamentary immunity protects members from legal action but can be lifted by a vote of the chamber, allowing national authorities to proceed with investigations.
All petitions from the Tusk government to lift immunity on Polish MEPs have thus far been approved by the ruling majority in the EP.
Tusk is a former leader of the European People’s Party, the largest party in the EP, which together with the liberal Renew Europe and the Socialists and Democrats has a comfortable majority within the chamber.
Two of the four MEPs are Patryk Jaki and Daniel Obajtek from the opposition Conservatives (PiS), a party which is part of the EP’s opposition European Conservative Reformers group.
The two remaining MEPs stripped of their parliamentary immunity are the independent right winger Grzegorz Braun, who leads the Polish Crown party, and Tomasz Buczek from the Confederation Party who is allied with the EP’s opposition European Patriots grouping.
The best known of the four is Grzegorz Braun, an MEP who has not been admitted to any of the right-wing groupings in the EP. He has now had his immunity lifted for the fifth time, this time for blocking a road in Jedwabne, the site of a Second World War pogrom against Jews during an anniversary of the massacre.
Braun has also had his immunity waived for putting out Hanukkah candles in the Polish parliament, saying that the gas chambers in the Auschwitz German concentration camps were “probably a fake”. It is also for disrupting a conference on the alleged involvement of Poles in the Holocaust and for assault, in the form of an attempted citizens arrest of a woman doctor who performed an abortion in the ninth month of pregnancy.
Patryk Jaki MEP has been accused of defaming Polish judge Igor Tuleya over remarks made during the 2024 European election campaign. The MEP said the judge knowingly authorised surveillance using Israeli Pegasus spyware. Tuleya did sign the court orders for such surveillance but claims he did not know that the Pegasus spyware would be used.
Daniel Obajtek MEP, the former head of state-controlled fuel giant Orlen, is facing allegations of giving false testimony in court and of allegedly restricting the distribution of the left-wing satirical weekly NIE at the company’s petrol stations over a cover mocking Polish Pope John Paul II.
Buczek, a member of the Confederation Party, is alleged to have violated the “physical integrity” of a participant during a 2024 election event, including forcibly taking a megaphone from a woman who was criticising him.
Four more PiS MEPs, Adam Bielan, Maciej Wąsik, Mariusz Kamiński and Michał Dworczyk have also had their immunities lifted to face charges produced by Polish prosecutors.
Dworczyk, a former minister in the last PiS government, is facing prosecution for having used his private email account, which was hacked to store government documents. Wasik and Kaminski, both officials in the last PiS administration, are to be tried for attending a meeting of the Polish parliament after they had been found guilty of abuse of power, even though they had both been pardoned by the president for the alleged crimes.
Polish MEPs are the most frequent subjects of proceedings to lift immunity in the current parliamentary term as the Tusk government has been keeping the promise it gave to its voters that it would pursue PiS and other right wing politicians for all their alleged misdemeanours.
