Prosecutors reject applications to ban Polish radical nationalist group ONR

Prosecutors have, after a four-year investigation, rejected requests to ban National Radical Camp (ONR), one of Poland’s leading far-right groups. They found that there was no evidence of gross or persistent violations of the law by the organisation.

Since 2017, four applications for the group to be delegalised have been submitted, including by the former mayors of Warsaw and Gdańsk, Hanna Gronkiewicz-Waltz and Paweł Adamowicz. The annual nationalist Independence March, co-organised by ONR, takes place in the capital each year, despite city authorities wanting it banned.

Gronkiewicz-Waltz submitted examples of court cases in which members of ONR had been convicted for inciting racial hatred and xenophobia, as well as promoting fascism, which are not only crimes but also violate Poland’s constitution.

Another of the applications was submitted by Ryszard Petru, former leader of the liberal Modern (Nowoczesna) party, who also pointed to the fact that the constitution prohibits “organisations whose programmes are based upon totalitarian methods…[and] sanction racial or ethnic hatred”.

Because ONR is registered in Kraków, prosecutors there were tasked with assessing the applications. Yesterday, the spokeswoman for the regional prosecutor’s office, Katarzyna Duda, confirmed to Gazeta Wyborcza that the investigation had been dropped.

“It has not been found that there were any actions grossly and persistently violating the law and the provisions of the association’s statute,” said Duda.

She explained that, of around ten criminal proceedings from across Poland involving ONR members examined by her office, none had resulted in convictions for promoting fascism or inciting ethnic hatred.

When Gazeta Wyborcza pointed out that last year two ONR members were convicted of inciting ethnic hatred for chanting that “Zionists will hang on trees”, Duda noted that the judgement was not yet binding.

The prosecutor’s office also said that its decision was based on expert opinions it had obtained. One of them was prepared by the Institute for the Legacy of Polish National Thought, a body set up by the government in 2020 and which is named after Roman Dmowski, a leading Polish nationalist figure.

After news of the prosecutors’ decision was first reported, the current mayor of Gdańsk, Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, declared that she will continue to “exhaust all legal paths available in both Poland and Europe” against ONR and another leading nationalist group, All-Polish Youth (Młodzież Wszechpolska).

She warned that “this milieu is today growing in strength”, pointing as evidence to the fact that the prime minister last month appointed a leading figure from All-Polish Youth as the deputy governor of the Pomerania province in which Gdańsk is located.

Poland’s ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party has no formal ties to far-right groups. But it has at times cooperated with and defended them, such as in relation to the Independence March, which went ahead last year after the government classified it as a state event in order to bypass a decision by courts and Warsaw to ban it.

Last June, a number of public figures jointly appealed to the government to “stop financing fascism”, after far-right groups founded by a former ONR leader, Robert Bąkiewicz, received millions of zloty in grants from a fund overseen by the culture ministry.

Earlier that year, the Supreme Court ruled that ONR can be described as “fascist” on the basis of “how it behaves, the slogans it proclaims, how it dresses, and the symbols it uses”, which are reminiscent of “Nazi and fascist militias”.

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. Its programme calls for Poland to be “ethnically homogeneous. 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. Last year, a former ONR activist resigned as head of a branch of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) after pictures emerged of him similarly 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, Przemysław Czarnek, in 2017 and 2018 attended marches organised by the same ONR branch in Lublin, where he was then provincial governor. 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.

Main image credit: Jakub Orzechowski / 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.