Head of EU Parliament submits request to lift immunity of four Polish ruling party MEPs

Feb 14, 2023 | Law, Politics

The president of the European Parliament (EP), Roberta Metsola, has submitted a request to strip four MEPs representing Poland’s ruling party of their immunity from prosecution.

The quartet are accused in Poland of violating hate crime laws through an election advert that warned of the dangers of allowing immigrants into the country. One of them, however, says that the case is purely political and has condemned Metsola for allowing it to proceed.

At the start of a plenary session of the parliament on Monday, Metsola announced that she had submitted a request to the EP’s legal affairs committee for Patryk Jaki, Beata Kempa, Beata Mazurek and Tomasz Poręba to have their immunity waived.

She did so in response to a request from the district court in Warsaw, where the four politicians are facing potential trial for inciting racial hatred, a crime that carries up to two years in prison.

All four were elected on the ticket of Poland’s ruling national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, though Jaki and Kempa are actually members of PiS’s hard-right junior coalition partner United Poland (Solidarna Polska), which is led by justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro.

The case against them was brought by the Centre for Monitoring Racist and Xenophobic Behaviour (OMZRiK), a Polish NGO that is part of the European Network Against Racism (ENAR).

OMZRiK accuses the politicians of inciting racial hatred through a 2018 election advert broadcast by PiS. It warned that opposition politicians wanted to “accept migrants” into Poland and presented an imaginary scenario of what Poland would look like within two years if they did so.

It portrayed riots, sex crimes, and included a clip of a man kicking a woman down the stairs in the Berlin U-Bahn. Though that clip has been widely used by campaigners against Muslim migration from outside the EU, the crime was actually committed by a Bulgarian (as was publicly reported two years before PiS produced its advert).

The court in Warsaw has accepted OMZRiK’s case but can only start proceedings if the MEPs are stripped of their immunity. The EP’s legal affairs committee will now assess the request, including hearing from the accused, before issuing a recommendation on whether to approve or reject it.

Then, at a plenary session of the EP, all MEPs will vote on whether to strip the quartet of their immunity, with the decision made by a simple majority.

OMZRiK has also included three other current and former PiS politicians – culture minister Piotr Gliński, defence minister Mariusz Błaszczak, and constitutional court judge Krystyna Pawłowicz – in its indictment. But a decision on stripping them of immunity would rest with Poland’s parliament.

One of the accused MEPs, Tomasz Poręba, called Mestola’s decision to refer the request to the committee “tragic and sad”. He suggested that it had political motives, given that it comes ahead of this autumn’s parliamentary elections in Poland, with Poręba himself being PiS’s campaign chief.

“Doing this today, after sitting on the case for a year and a half, is clearly joining the election campaign that is starting in Poland,” Poręba told the Polish Press Agency (PAP). “It is no secret that I am to be responsible for running the campaign of the ruling party. This is an attempt to intimidate.”

Poręba also criticised both the Warsaw court and Mestola for taking seriously a case filed by OMZRiK, whose founder, Rafał Gaweł, was in 2019 convicted of fraud in Poland. Gaweł subsequently obtained asylum in Norway, claiming that he was the victim of a politicised justice system.

Mestola was also criticised by Polish deputy justice minister Sebastian Kaleta, who told state broadcaster TVP that she had made the decision now in an effort to “cover up” the ongoing “Quatargate” corruption scandal enveloping the EP.

Main image credit: European Union 2022– Source: EP (under CC BY 4.0)

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