Court orders Polish opposition figure to apologise to Kaczyński over Smolensk accusation

A court has ordered Radosław Sikorski, a leading opposition figure, to apologise to ruling party chairman Jarosław Kaczyński for a tweet suggesting that his late brother, President Lech Kaczyński, was responsible for the plane crash that killed him and 95 others.

The tweet in question was made in January 2021, when Sikorski – a former government minister and now MEP for Civic Platform (PO), Poland’s main opposition party – was expressing opposition to a street being named after Lech Kaczyński.

“Enough of building a cult for which there is no basis,” wrote Sikorski. “Lech Kaczyński was a mediocre president and greatly contributed to the Smolensk disaster.”

The Smolensk air disaster of 2010 resulted in the death of Lech Kaczyński, his wife Maria, and dozens of other high-ranking officials. Some have claimed that the then-president put pressure on the pilots to land, thereby contributing to the crash, but the official Polish investigation did not substantiate that theory.

Jaroslaw Kaczyński sued Sikorski over the tweet, demanding that he apologise for “defamation and violation of personal rights”. The PiS leader also called for Sikorski to pay a 10,000 zloty (€2,128) charitable donation.

“Attributing to anyone a contribution and responsibility for the air crash in which 96 people died without any factual basis constitutes defamation and a violation of personal rights,” read an excerpt from the letter.

“In this state of affairs, you have violated the personal rights of Mr Jarosław Kaczyński as the closest person to the late President Lech Kaczyński in the form of remembrance and veneration of the deceased.”

Today, both Kaczyński’s lawyer and Sikorski himself announced that a court had ruled in the PiS chairman’s favour and ordered the opposition politician to apologise.

The ruling requires Sikorski to publish a post saying that he “apologises to Mr Jarosław Kaczyński for…violating his personal rights, in the form of the cult of the memory of a deceased person, by stating that President Lech Kaczyński greatly contributed to the Smolensk catastrophe”.

In addition, Sikorski is to bear the costs of the trial. However, he has the right to appeal, and has already announced that he intends to do so.

This is not the first time the two politicians have clashed in court over the Smolensk disaster. In 2020, a judge ordered Kaczyński to publish an apology to Sikorski – who had been foreign minister at the time of the crash – suggesting that he was guilty of “treason” in relation to the catastrophe.

After the PiS chairman failed to do so, Sikorski took him to court again, with a judge last year ordering Kaczyński to pay 700,000 zloty for the apology to be published.

Eventually, after Kaczyński said that he would struggle to pay such a large amount, Sikorski agreed to settle the dispute by allowing the PiS chairman to donate 50,000 to Ukraine’s armed forces.

PiS and its leader have long claimed that the Smolensk crash was not an accident, as official investigations found, but was caused deliberately. However, despite spending eight years and millions of zloty reinvestigating the incident, the party has not produced any conclusive evidence to support its claims.

Main image credit: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland/Flickr (under CC BY-ND 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

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