Ex-justice minister Ziobro says he will return to Poland to face charges “when rule of law is restored”

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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.

Poland’s former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who was last week stripped of legal immunity by parliament to face 26 criminal charges, says he will only return to the country “when the rule of law is restored”.

His announcement came after Ziobro’s lawyer informed Polish prosecutors that his client is willing to be interviewed and presented with his charges either in Hungary, where he is currently located, or Belgium, where he has recently been living.

Some reports have suggested that Ziobro will seek political asylum in Hungary, as did one of his former deputies last year after an arrest warrant was issued for him in Poland.

On Tuesday, the Rzeczpospolita daily first reported that Ziobro was offering to attend a hearing and be presented with charges in Budapest or Brussels. That was later confirmed by his lawyer, Bartosz Lewandowski, who said he had submitted the request to prosecutors on Wednesday.

“The prosecutor’s office has two foreign addresses for Ziobro,” Lewandowski told Rzeczpospolita. “We proposed that he be questioned through the assistance of the consular office, or through international assistance. He can appear at the agreed-upon time and place.”

One of the two addresses is in Brussels, where Ziobro has reportedly been living with his family for over a year after his wife began working at the European Parliament. Ziobro has also been undergoing cancer treatment during that time. He has meanwhile remained a member of Poland’s parliament.

The second address is in Budapest. The day before Poland’s justice minister submitted a request to parliament to strip Ziobro of immunity, Ziobro announced that he had arrived in Budapest for a pre-arranged event at which he said he would “show my Hungarian friends” how the Polish government is “violating laws”.

He appears to have remained there ever since. He even met with Prime Minister Viktor Orbán – an ally of Ziobro’s Law and Justice (PiS) party – who posted a picture of the pair together and condemned the “witch hunt” against the Polish right launched by “the pro-Brusselian Polish government”.

In its report, Rzeczpospolita suggests that Ziobro’s offer to be interviewed is intended to demonstrate that he is not in hiding, which would be grounds for a court to order an arrest warrant for him. That in turn could be used to issue a European Arrest Warrant.

“The prosecutor’s office has been informed of his location, so there is no question of him going into hiding, since his life has been centred outside of Poland for a long time,” Lewandowski told the newspaper.

Should prosecutors take up Ziobro’s offer, there are two ways in which they could do it. The first would be for him to appear at a Polish consulate in Hungary or Belgium and be interviewed by the consul.

The second would be for Poland to seek international legal assistance, whereby a court or prosecutor’s office in the relevant country would conduct the hearing with questions prepared by the Polish prosecutors.

There has so far been no response by prosecutors to Ziobro’s proposal. However, deputy prime minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz said on Wednesday that his questioning “should take place in Poland, not in a location designated by the person who is to testify”.

“Ziobro’s impudence knows no bounds,” Dariusz Joński, a politician from Poland’s ruling coalition, told broadcaster Tok FM, suggesting sarcastically that “perhaps he wants to establish a list of questions before meeting the prosecutor” as well.

However, in an interview with broadcaster Polsat on Wednesday evening, Ziobro said that he would only return to Poland “when the rule of law is restored”. He called Poland’s current government a “criminal gang” and said that Prime Minister Donald Tusk is “committing crime after crime”.

Between 2015 and 2023, Ziobro was the driving force behind the PiS government’s highly contested judicial reforms, which saw Poland plummet in international rule-of-law rankings.

Prosecutors want to charge him with a long list of alleged offences committed during that time, including establishing and leading a criminal group and abusing his powers for personal and political gain. If found guilty, he could face up to 25 years in prison.

The 26 offences Ziobro is accused of relate to the administration of the Justice Fund, which is managed by the justice ministry and is meant to be used to support victims of crime, as well as for certain other initiatives to reduce crime or rehabilitate criminals.

However, Ziobro was regularly accused of using the fund for political purposes and, in one case, to unlawfully finance the purchase of Israeli-made Pegasus spyware, which was in turn used to surveil figures opposed to the PiS government.

In a series of votes last Friday evening, a majority of members of parliament approved the lifting of Ziobro’s immunity for each of the 26 charges against him as well as for him to be placed in pretrial detention.

Ziobro denies that any misuse of the Justice Fund took place and claims that prosecutors are now pursuing him on orders of the current government as part of a “political vendetta”.

The current ruling coalition, which replaced PiS in power in December 2023, has made holding former PiS officials to account for alleged crimes one of its top priorities.

Two of Ziobro’s former deputy justice ministers are already facing charges for alleged crimes. Last year, one of them, Marcin Romanowski, fled to Hungary after police in Poland issued an arrest warrant for him.

He was subsequently granted political asylum there, prompting a diplomatic dispute that resulted in Poland withdrawing its ambassador from Budapest. Last week, Romanowski said he “would encourage to take advantage of legal protection” in Hungary because he has “no chance of a fair trial” in Poland.

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)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.