Polish parliament votes for ex-justice minister to be forcibly brought to testify in spyware probe

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

The ruling majority in parliament has voted in favour of Zbigniew Ziobro, who served as justice minister from 2015 to 2023 in the former Law and Justice (PiS) government, to be detained and forcibly brought to testify before a committee investigating the use of Pegasus spyware under PiS.

Ziobro has so far failed to respond to four summonses to appear before the committee. He has cited both health grounds (he is undergoing cancer treatment) and the fact that the constitutional court (a body regarded as under PiS influence) has deemed the committee unlawful.

However, yesterday a majority of 241 MPs in the 460-seat Sejm, the lower house of parliament, voted in favour of a request from current justice minister Adam Bodnar for Ziobro to be brought in by force. Their consent was required because Ziobro enjoys legal immunity as a member of the Sejm.

Almost all the votes in favour came from MPs in the current ruling coalition, which stretches from left to centre-right, while a further five came from the small left-wing Together (Razem) party that recently split from the coalition.

The 204 votes against the motion came mainly from the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party itself, which was joined by the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja), also an opposition party, and the small Republicans (Republikanie) group that is aligned with PiS.

Ziobro himself has declared that he would be very happy to appear before a Pegasus committee, but only one that is legally formed. “No one who respects the law in Poland can recognise this pseudo-committee,” he declared yesterday from the parliamentary rostrum, quoted by news website Onet.

He and other PiS figures have pointed to an interim order and subsequent full ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal (TK) finding the Pegasus committee to have been improperly formed.

However, the ruling majority has ignored those decisions, pointing to the fact that the TK itself is an unlawful body as its outgoing chief justice – a close associate of PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński – and three of its other judges were improperly appointed.

This week, for the first time in parliamentary history, a witness was forcibly brought to testify before the committee. Piotr Pogonowski, who led the Internal Security Agency (ABW) during PiS’s time in power, was compelled to testify about his knowledge of Pegasus.

The spyware system was used to surveil almost 600 people between 2017 and 2022, some of whom were opponents of PiS, notably the head of the main opposition’s parliamentary election campaign in 2019.

After a new ruling coalition replaced PiS in late 2023, prosecutors launched investigations into the use of Pegasus under the previous administration and parliament set up a special committee to do the same.

Earlier this week, the deputy head of the committee, Marcin Bosacki, told broadcaster TVN that, if parliament approved forcing Ziobro to give testimony, it was possible he could be brought to a hearing in January. Today, broadcaster RMF reports unofficially that the date of 31 January has been mooted.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: KPRM (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)