Court rejects request to detain Polish justice minister Ziobro as part of Pegasus investigation

Mar 31, 2025 | Law, Politics

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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.

A court has rejected a request by a parliamentary commission investigating the use of Pegasus spyware by the former Law and Justice (PiS) government to detain former PiS justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro for 30 days for allegedly failing to appear for questioning.

Ziobro has hailed the ruling – which can still be appealed – as vindicating his position that the commission was established by the governing coalition simply as a means to unlawfully attack its political opponents.

In late January, a court ordered police to apprehend Ziobro and forcibly bring him to give testimony to the Pegasus commission, after he had previously ignored multiple summonses, citing, among other reasons, health grounds (he has been undergoing cancer treatment).

On the morning of his hearing, 31 January, police were initially unable to locate Ziobro. By the time they did, it was just after 10:30 a.m., which was the time the commission was due to begin its meeting.

After Ziobro failed to appear at 10:30 a.m., the committee invoked article 287 of the criminal procedure code, which permits up to 30 days’ detention for witnesses who refuse to testify.

 

However, on Monday, the district court in Warsaw rejected that request, with judge Anna Ptaszek saying that “the commission had no legal basis” to seek Ziobro’s detention, reports news website Wirtualna Polska.

Ptaszek said that information provided by the commission itself, by the parliamentary authorities, and by the police indicated that the commission could have still held Ziobro’s hearing but had itself decided to “withdraw from it of its own free will”.

On the day the incident happened, an opposition member of the commission, Przemysław Wipler, had said that the commission was aware Ziobro was already in parliament accompanied by police when it decided to request his 30-day detention.

This morning, Ziobro also shared on social media an extract from a police submission to the court which showed that they had been informed by its chairwoman, Magdalena Sroka, that, if they were unable to bring Ziobro to his hearing by 10:30 a.m., the commission could wait for him until 12 noon.

“[This] is yet further indisputable proof that the illegal commission extorted the court’s consent to my being brought in not for the purpose of questioning, but for pure political chutzpah,” wrote Ziobro.

“[It] is also evidence that the pseudo-commission exists solely to attack the opposition at the request of [Prime Minister] Donald Tusk – in this case by unlawfully attempting to detain an opposition MP,” he added.

Ziobro and others in PiS have long argued that the Pegasus commission was illegitimately formed and that its activities are therefore unlawful. That position was endorsed by the Constitutional Tribunal (TK), a body seen as being under PiS influence and not recognised by the government.

However, today’s ruling by the Warsaw court, although it rejected the commission’s request to detain Ziobro, also refuted the idea that the commission itself is illegal.

“The court found that the commission operates legally, has the right to summon witnesses, and that witnesses are obliged to appear at the commission’s meetings,” said judge Ptaszek.

She then added that the TK’s own ruling on this issue “was passed by a questionable composition” of judges and “was not effectively published”. That refers to the fact that three TK judges were unlawfully appointed when PiS was in power, rendering rulings involving them invalid.

Ptaszek also noted that “the court considered Mr Ziobro’s attitude…highly reprehensible”, reports Wirtualna Polska.

Sroka, meanwhile, announced that the commission would appeal against today’s ruling. She said that “Zbigniew Ziobro did everything not to let himself be detained in order to be taken to the commission for questioning”, reports newspaper Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.

Referring to the police document, Sroka explained that she had “agreed with the commander conducting the activities that if the arrest was made before 10:30 a.m. and this information reached us, a break would be called…However, this information did not reach the commission [before 10:30 a.m.]”.

Meanwhile, her commission today issued a separate request to Warsaw’s district court for Ernest Bejda, who was head of the Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA) during PiS’s time in power, to be detained and forcibly brought to testify after he refused to appear.

The former PiS government purchased Pegasus, an Israeli-made surveillance tool, for use by the CBA. The spyware was deployed against nearly 600 individuals between 2017 and 2022, including political opponents of the ruling party.

After Tusk’s new ruling coalition replaced PiS in power in late 2023, prosecutors launched investigations into the use of Pegasus under PiS, while parliament set up a special committee to do the same.

Last year, Ziobro’s former deputy justice minister, Michał Woś, was stripped of immunity by parliament to face charges relating to the purchase of Pegasus. Another of Ziobro’s former deputies, Marcin Romanowski, fled to Hungary and claimed political asylum rather than face criminal charges in Poland.

He did so after an initial attempt to detain him was rejected by a court because prosecutors had failed to take account of Romanowski’s legal immunity as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.


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: Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

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