Fugitive opposition politician granted safe passage to return to Poland against prosecutors’ wishes

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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 Warsaw court has approved a request from Marcin Romanowski, a fugitive former government minister who has been on the run for almost two years, to receive safe passage back to Poland. Romanowski is believed to currently be in the pro-Russian Moldovan breakaway region of Transnistria.

Although Polish prosecutors have long been seeking Romanowski’s return, they opposed his request for safe conduct, arguing that he cannot be trusted to comply with its terms given that he has repeatedly sought to evade the law.

Waldemar Żurek, the justice minister and prosecutor general, has already announced that prosecutors will appeal the court’s decision, which he claims was issued by an illegitimately appointed judge and in violation of regulations.

Romanowski served as deputy justice minister in the former Law and Justice (PiS) government between 2019 and 2023. After PiS lost power, prosecutors sought to bring charges against him for 11 alleged crimes committed while he served in government, including participating in an organised criminal group.

However, Romanowski fled Poland in December 2024 and was granted asylum by Hungary, which was then ruled by Viktor Orbán, a conservative ally of PiS. When Orbán lost power earlier this year, Romanowski went on the run, and for months his location was unknown.

In August, it emerged that Romanowski had sent a letter to Poland requesting safe passage to return. The document indicated that he was in Tiraspol, the capital of Transnistria, a region that sought to break away from Moldova in the 1990s and is now effectively under Russian control.

At the time, the spokesman for Poland’s National Prosecutor’s Office, Przemysław Nowak, said that there were “no grounds whatsoever” to approve Romanowski’s request for safe passage to Poland.

He noted that “the suspect has evaded legal proceedings, questioned the legality of the authorities’ actions, left Poland and then Hungary to avoid arrest, and publicly declared his lack of intention to return to the country due to the ongoing criminal proceedings against him”.

However, on Wednesday, Warsaw’s district court approved Romanowski’s request. A spokeswoman for the court said that the decision had been made as “previous methods used [to secure Romanowski’s return] were ineffective” and safe passage would “allow the case to be clarified”.

The politician’s lawyer, Bartosz Lewandowski, said that safe passage meant his client could not be detained in Poland and that a European Arrest Warrant against him, which applies in other EU countries, would no longer be valid.

In a subsequent justification for the ruling, quoted by the Rzeczpospolita daily, judge Konrad Mielcarek wrote that Romanowski had pledged to “voluntarily return to the country”.

Conditions for his safe passage include Romanowski reporting to the court and prosecutors at designated times and places, not leaving his declared place of residence, and not seeking to obstruct the criminal proceedings against him.

The judge said that prosecutors had failed to provide adequate arguments as to why Romanowski’s request should be denied. He also found that Romanowski had not obstructed proceedings against him, but had merely exercised available legal remedies.

The fact that Romanowski had fled Poland does not count against him, argued the judge. In fact, “the very nature of safe passage is to provide a person residing abroad with a legal guarantee…in exchange for voluntarily submitting to the jurisdiction of Polish authorities”.

The judge also clarified that safe passage is neither a “reward” nor a “privilege” and that, given that evidence in the case is already secured and Romanowski no longer has influence over justice ministry officials, the risk of tampering is low.

The National Prosecutor’s Office immediately issued a statement declaring its opposition to the ruling and its intention to appeal. It noted that there had been no confirmation that Romanowski really is in Tiraspol and that the suspect had repeatedly sought to evade the law.

“These circumstances do not provide assurance that the suspect will comply with the conditions of the letter of safe conduct,” wrote the prosecutors, who also pointed to the fact that Romanowski had admitted to using travel documents issued under a false identity.

Żurek, meanwhile, noted that Mielcarek is one of the so-called “neo-judges”, appointed by a judicial body rendered illegitimate by PiS’s reforms. There are legal doubts about the status of such judges and the rulings issued by them, some of which have been overturned on that basis.

In his statement, the justice minister also argued that, under the law, safe passage cannot be issued without a prosecutor’s consent. Lewandowski, however, cited examples of case law that he said disproved this. He also noted that prosecutors had not filed any motion to recuse Mielcarek from the case.

Romanowski served in the justice ministry when it was led by Zbigniew Ziobro, a deputy leader of PiS, who is also wanted by the Polish authorities on suspicion of 26 crimes relating to his time in office.

Like his deputy, Ziobro also obtained asylum in Hungary. When Orbán lost power, Ziobro fled to the United States, reportedly with help from a senior Trump administration official. Poland has requested that Ziobro be extradited, though that process could take years.

Both Ziobro and Romanowski deny committing the crimes they are accused of and claim that they are being pursued as an act of “political revenge” by the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

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: Elekes Andor/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 4.0)

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.