Far-right group can be called “fascist”, rules Poland’s Supreme Court

National Radical Camp (ONR), one of Poland’s most prominent far-right groups, can be described as “fascist”, the Supreme Court has ruled. The activist who won the case now hopes that the ruling can be the basis for having ONR outlawed completely, as promoting fascism is illegal under Polish law.

ONR is one of the three groups that founded and continues to play a leading role in organising the annual Independence March in Warsaw, which draws tens of thousands of participants and has received support from Poland’s current national-conservative ruling camp.

Last year’s event saw attacks by some participants against the police, as well as arson against an apartment displaying an LGBT rainbow flag. Afterwards, opposition parties called for the march and ONR to be outlawed. But the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party blamed the violence – without evidence – on “provocateurs”.

The new Supreme Court ruling ends a four-year legal battle by ONR members against a left-wing activist. In 2017, Robert Koliński – from the Left Together (Lewica Razem) party – expressed opposition to a march in the city of Elbląg organised by ONR and another far-right group, All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolska).

In online comments, Koliński wrote that ONR “openly refers to its pre-war, fascist, antisemitic, racist and xenophobic roots”. A few weeks later, he learned that an ONR activist, Jacek Gierwatowski, had initiated court proceedings against him in response to the remarks, reports Gazeta Wyborcza.

Over the next four years, five court rulings were issued on the case, with the outcome going in Koliński’s favour. One judge noted that today’s ONR “uses the same symbols and name…[as a] pre-war organisation that was openly fascist”.

ONR marching in Kraków, April 2007 (Efka de/Wikimedia Commons, under CC BY SA 3.0)

“I’m not saying that you are fascists or Nazis,” continued the judge. “I’m just saying that the accused had the right to think so on the basis of…how you behave, the slogans you proclaim, how you dress, the symbols you use…This was how Nazi and fascist militias dressed before and during the Second World War.”

He also noted that today’s ONR programme calls for Poland to be “ethnically homogeneous”. This “is an important element of fascist views”, said the judge.

A final appeal by Gierwatowski was heard at Poland’s Supreme Court earlier this month, and yesterday it was announced that it had been rejected. The justification for the decision has not yet been made public, but it means that proceedings are now closed and the case against Koliński has failed.

Koliński, however, sees this as only a partial victory. The courts did not rule on whether ONR is fascist or not, just on whether he had the right to call it such. Koliński now wants a further ruling that “will clearly recognise ONR as a fascist organisation and lead to its banning”, he told Gazeta Wyborcza.

Poland’s constitution “prohibits parties and other organisations whose programmes are based upon…Nazism, fascism and communism, as well as those whose programmes and activities sanction racial or ethnic hatred”.

Koliński says that during the case he received support from leading Polish historians, who provided him with evidence of ONR’s historical and recent activity. He was able to successfully use these to support his case.

“The ONR members who took me to court had no idea about a lot of the facts I presented before the court,” he told Gazeta Wyborcza. “Their eyes widened with surprise when I talked about the collaboration of some parts of ONR with the Nazis during the war.”

In its current form, ONR has been active since the 1990s, when it re-emerged following the fall of communism in Poland. However, it traces its roots back to an interwar group of the same name founded in 1934.

The original ONR was formed amid the growth of fascism in Italy and Germany, and adopted a fascist-style “Falanga” logo, which is still used today. It was avowedly antisemitic, and led campaigns against Poland’s large Jewish minority, which it wanted removed from the country.

Today’s incarnation of the organisation celebrates its interwar roots, and also expresses openly anti-Jewish, anti-LGBT and Islamophobic sentiment. Until around a decade ago, its members often wore brown-shirted uniforms to events and some performed fascist “Roman” salutes.

In 2008, three ONR activists were found guilty of “propagating Nazism” for making the salute, with the judge rejecting their claims that it was not a fascist gesture. This week, a former ONR activist resigned as head of a branch of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) after pictures emerged of him saluting.

In 2019, prosecutors began an investigation into ONR’s branch in Lublin for the crime of propagating fascism. It had published a tweet celebrating Belgian Nazi collaborator and wartime SS officer Léon Degrelle as “one of the greatest national revolutionaries”.

The same branch in January 2018 tweeted an extract from the interwar ONR’s programme in which it promised to “fight international Jewry”, which is a “parasite living on national organisms”.

Poland’s current education minister – a controversial hardliner who has been prominent in PiS’s anti-LGBT campaign – in 2017 and 2018 attended marches organised in Lublin by the same ONR branch.

At one, he addressed the crowd from a stage above the ONR logo, giving a speech in which he defended the organisation from “anti-Polish” politicians who criticised it, reported Wirtualna Polska at the time.

ONR’s former spokesman, Tomasz Kalinowski, had an image of Degrelle as his Facebook cover photo. He is now the deputy head of the body that organises the Independence March. Its head is a former leader of ONR, Robert Bąkiewicz. ONR has previously invited Italian neo-fascist group Forza Nuova to the attend the event.

In 2018, the government and President Andrzej Duda coordinated with the organisers of the Independence March to hold simultaneous processions along the same route to mark the centenary of Poland regaining its independence.

Earlier the same year, ONR had been part of a far-right protest outside the presidential palace at which participants called on Duda (who is not Jewish) to “take off your yarmulke”. It was also one of the organisers of an anti-refugee rally in Wrocław in 2015 at which an effigy of a Jew was burned.

ONR has been prominent at protests against LGBT equality marches in Poland, which have often turned violent, with attacks against marchers and police.

Main image credit: Agata Grzybowska / Agencja Gazeta

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.