First President of the Supreme Court Małgorzata Gersdorf addresses protesters in July 2018. Source: Reuters/M. Gocłowski.

By Stanley Bill

Since winning power in October 2015, the Polish government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) party has introduced a raft of changes to all levels of the country’s judicial system. Domestic opponents, along with the European Commission and the Venice Commission, have accused them of undermining the rule of law and flouting the Constitution. Protesters have filled the streets at regular intervals. Yet the abstract nature of the changes and the unappealing involvement of the parliamentary opposition have made it difficult for the resistance movement to gain any real popular momentum. Many Poles find the new laws excessive, but most also feel that the judicial system genuinely needs reform.

My aim in this article is to put the key changes and their consequences together to show the big picture. Both the expert Venice Commission and the European Commission have emphasized that the cumulative effect of the reforms significantly exacerbates their potential consequences. Most of the measures are concerning in themselves, but some are arguably defensible in isolation. Only when the changes are viewed together does the true scale of the threat to rule of law in Poland become clear.

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Rywka Wajnberg and Małka Wakslicht, Polish Jews in hiding in Biłgoraj during the Second World War. Image Source: Gazeta Wyborcza.

By Stanley Bill

In 2018, the Polish government’s politics of memory have been a public relations disaster for the country. A declared intention to defend the good name of “the nation” against false accusations of collaboration in the Holocaust has instead created a wave of international outrage and negative media coverage of Poland’s past and present. From the misconceived formulation of the so-called “Holocaust law” to clumsy public statements from Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, Poland’s leaders have drawn international attention to the vexed question of Polish complicity with German crimes instead of clarifying a complex and painful history in which Polish Jews and non-Jewish Poles suffered on an enormous scale. It is true that Western understandings of Poland’s history under the German occupation are often inaccurate, but the government has only exacerbated the problem through a mixture of tone-deaf incompetence and cynical manipulation of domestic emotions. In belated response to the public relations fiasco, the Polish parliament ratified a hasty “correction” to the law this week, but the damage to Poland’s reputation had already been done.

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Professor Robert Frost at the University of Cambridge in 2015.

By Andrzej Nowak and Robert Frost

This week, prominent historians Professor Andrzej Nowak (Jagiellonian University) and Professor Robert Frost (University of Aberdeen) wrote a public letter to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on the recent controversy over the new law regulating historical discourse in Poland. Earlier this year, the two historians won prestigious prizes from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the best books promoting Polish history. They first published their letter in Polish on conservative news websites wPolityce.pl and Do Rzeczy. The letter emerged from the participation of both professors in a lively discussion of the new law at the recent Belvedere Polish-British Forum in London, in which the Notes from Poland team also took part. Notes from Poland is pleased to publish the official English version of the letter here.

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