A man has been sentenced for the crime of insulting the president, after he defaced an election poster of President Andrzej Duda while drunk earlier this year.
In July, when Duda was standing for re-election, a 48-year-old man – named only as Bartosz Ś. under Polish law – wrote “five years of shame” on one of the president’s election posters. He also crossed out Duda’s image and drew male genitalia on his forehead.
Finding the defendant guilty, the court in Toruń deemed that the first two acts did not constitute the offence of insulting the president, but that drawing genitals on the poster did.
The judge handed Bartosz Ś. a sentence of six months’ community service and ordered him to refrain from drinking alcohol for that period, reports Dziennik.pl.
The defendant had previously submitted a plea bargain agreeing to a six-month suspended prison sentence and fine as well as undertaking to abstain from alcohol. The prosecutor’s office accepted these terms, but the court decided to impose a different sentence, which can still be appealed.
Bartosz Ś. said that he was ashamed and repentant and should have known better at his age, reports Dziennik.pl.
“I expressed my distaste at Andrzej Duda’s presidency in a vulgar way. I am usually apolitical…[but] this was the time after the president’s very dubious pardoning of a man who abused his family, so all this accumulated inside of me,” he said.
Insulting the president is a crime punishable by up to three years in prison in Poland. It is one of a wide range of defamation and insult laws that are among the broadest and strictest in any democratic country, according to a study by the OSCE.
It is also illegal, among other things, to insult the Polish nation or state (punishable by up to three years in prison), state emblems (up to one year), and even monuments (community service), as well as to offend religious feelings (up to two years).
In February this year, a protester who greeted Duda in the town of Łowicz with a banner saying “We have an idiot for a president” was detained by police and charged with insulting the president.
In 2006, police spent months tracking down a homeless man who had drunkenly called the then president, Lech Kaczyński, a “thief”. In 2008, a man was given a suspended sentence for creating a computer program that made Kaczyński’s official website appear at the top of search-engine results when someone typed in a slang word for penis.
An unemployed teacher was twice convicted for writing anonymous vulgar comments about Kaczyński’s successor as president, Bronisław Komorowski. Another man was sentenced to community service for creating a website including a game in which players could shoot at Komorowski’s image.
This year, LGBT activists have been charged with the crime of offending religious feelings for adding rainbow colours to an image of the Virgin Mary and for hanging a rainbow flag on a statue of Jesus.
This week, the prosecutor general requested that an opposition MP’s parliamentary immunity be waived so that she can face charges of offending religious sentiment for carrying out a pro-choice protest in a church.
Main image credit: Patryk Ogorzałek / Agencja Gazeta
Ben Koschalka is a translator and senior editor at Notes from Poland. Originally from Britain, he has lived in Kraków since 2005.
