The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal against a ruling that awarded a teacher compensation for being discriminated against at work after she removed a Christian cross from the staff room. The justice minister in Poland’s conservative government had sought to have the decision overturned.
The development brings to an end a long-running case. In 2014, Grażyna Juszczyk, a maths teacher in the small town of Krapkowice, took down the cross, which had been hung there the previous year ahead of a visit by the local bishop.
Juszczyk, who is an atheist, argued that public institutions such as schools should be “neutral and secular”, and that therefore crosses – which commonly hang in such buildings – should not be present.
As a result, the teacher faced bullying from other members of staff, including the management of the school, reports Onet. She took the case to court, and in 2016 the school was ordered to apologise and pay her 5,000 zloty (€1,100) compensation for being discriminated against due to her beliefs.
After that ruling was upheld on appeal in 2017, the regional prosecutor – who is under the ultimate authority of Zbigniew Ziobro, the justice minister and prosecutor general – then sought to have it overturned by the Supreme Court.
But that request was also rejected, with the Supreme Court finding in 2018 that the behaviour of the school’s management had “created an atmosphere of hostility towards the employer and exposed [her] to attacks and insults, as well as an attempt to ostracise [her] from other staff and pupils”.
The court made clear that the issue at stake was not whether crosses can hang in schools or the broader right of believers to manifest their religious faith. The only issue in question was the behaviour of the school’s management towards its employee.
Last year, Ziobro issued a so-called “extraordinary complaint” against the latter ruling. He was granted this power in 2018 as part of the government’s contested judicial reforms. This allows the prosecutor general to challenge any binding judgement from the last five years if he deems it “necessary to ensure the rule of law and social justice”.
In his filing, Ziobro argued that the Supreme Court had “not sufficiently explained what was the discrimination against the claimant on the basis of her worldview and the related harassment, nor indicated a sufficient relationship between her worldview and actions constituting discrimination by the employer”.
In response to Ziobro’s action, Juszczyk that she felt she was being deliberately “harassed” in order to discourage others from taking similar actions to hers. “I do not understand why the prosecutor general is fighting the victim of these events and not the people guilty of humiliating me,” she told Gazeta Wyborcza.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court rejected Ziobro’s complaint on the basis that it was “identical” to the case previously brought by the regional prosecutor, which had already been rejected by the same court, reports Onet.
In another long-running case, Ziobro successfully intervened in 2019 to have a court dismiss proceedings against a print-shop worker who refused to produce material for an LGBT client and set aside previous verdicts punishing him for doing so.
Main image credit: Piotr Skornicki /Agencja Gazeta
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.
