Court orders Kaczyński to pay 700,000 zloty for apology to opposition politician Sikorski

A court has ordered ruling party chairman Jarosław Kaczyński to pay 700,000 zloty (€150,000) to publish an apology to Radosław Sikorski, a former government minister and now leading opposition figure.

The payment was demanded by Sikorski to cover the costs of publishing an apology that Kaczyński was in July 2020 ordered to make for defaming Sikorski in relation to the 2010 Smolensk plane crash that killed President Lech Kaczyński, Jarosław’s twin brother.

Sikorski was foreign minister at the time of the tragedy and Jarosław Kaczyński – who claims the crash was deliberately caused and later covered up – accused him of actions that amounted to “diplomatic treason”, a crime carrying a prison sentence of up to ten years.

Kaczyński has so far failed to comply with the 2020 ruling, which required him to publish the apology to Sikorski on the Onet news website where his interview containing the defamatory words was originally published.

Sikorski was therefore last year awarded the right to arrange publication of the apology himself and to obtain the funds to pay for it from Kaczyński. It was on that basis that he then applied to a court for the money.

On Thursday, Sikorski’s lawyer, Jacek Dubois announced that Kaczyński had been ordered to pay “708,480 zloty to cover the costs of publishing an apology on Onet”. He added, however, that the ruling can be appealed and that it is likely Kaczyński will do so.

Kaczyński himself has not publicly commented on Thursday’s ruling, but on Friday the spokesman for his national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, Rafał Bochenek, called the figure of 700,000 zloty an “irrational and completely disproportionate amount”.

Bochenek said that he is not aware of any previous ruling of this kind, especially given that Kaczyński is still awaiting the outcome of a request he has made to the Supreme Court to overturn the verdict.

“They talk about freedom of speech, the constitution, but this ruling proves best that they are violating it, depriving people who have different views of the right to freedom of speech, which is the foundation of democracy,” said Bochenek, quoted by Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

“The fact that a PO politician and the German portal Onet are involved in all this does not surprise us in any way,” he added, referring to the fact that Onet is owned by Swiss-German-US concern Ringier Axel Springer and Sikorski belongs to the Civic Platform (PO) party, which PiS often accuses of representing German interests.

Regarding the amount Kaczyński has been ordered to pay, Dubois said that it is the PiS chairman’s own fault.

“A year ago it cost half as much, but he refused to fulfil the court’s obligation, and prices soared over that time,” Sikorski’s lawyer told Onet.

According to the 2020 court judgement, the apology by Kaczyński to Sikorski must read:

In connection with the interviews I gave to www.onet.pl and the Polish Press Agency, I apologise to Mr. Radosław Sikorski for providing the false information that, acting as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, he withdrew a diplomatic note regarding recognition of the Smolensk crash site as extraterritorial and committed diplomatic betrayal. With my statement I violated the personal rights of Mr. Radosław Sikorski in the form of his good name and honour. Jarosław Kaczyński

The defamatory remarks in question were made by Kaczyński in 2016 when discussing the plane crash that killed his brother and 95 others, many of them high-ranking Polish officials.

While official investigations found the crash to have been a tragic accident, PiS has long argued that it was caused deliberately and that the PO government of the time was involved in the plot, or at least in subsequent efforts to cover it up.

Despite spending millions of zloty on reinvestigating the crash since coming to power in 2015, and regularly claiming that it has uncovered proof to substantiate its theories, PiS has as yet not published any such conclusive evidence.

Main photo credit: WOJCIECH OLKUSNIK / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.