Polish PM hits out at “outrageous” US decision to grant visa to fugitive ex-justice minister

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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 prime minister, Donald Tusk, has described the decision by the United States to grant a visa to former Polish justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who is wanted in his homeland on 26 criminal charges, as “outrageous”.

Tusk’s remarks, the strongest he has made since Ziobro fled to the US earlier this month, came in the wake of reporting by Reuters that a senior US official personally intervened to ensure that Ziobro, whose Law and Justice (PiS) party is closely aligned with President Donald Trump, received a visa.

Speaking during public remarks ahead of a closed meeting of his cabinet on Tuesday, Tusk said that “Polish-American relations are in the spotlight due to the outrageous issue of the granting of a visa to Zbigniew Ziobro, a fugitive from the Polish state”.

Polish prosecutors want to charge Ziobro, who served as justice minister and prosecutor general in the national-conservative PiS government that ruled Poland from 2015 to 2023, with a variety of offences, including leading a criminal group and approving the unlawful purchase of Pegasus spyware.

In October, the government’s majority in parliament approved the lifting of Ziobro’s immunity from prosecution. However, he had by then already travelled to Hungary, where he was granted asylum by the government of then Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, a PiS and Trump ally.

Hungary’s newly elected prime minister, Péter Magyar, had promised to extradite Ziobro to Poland. But, on the day of his swearing-in on 9 May, Ziobro fled to the United States.

Since then, speculation has been rife as to how Ziobro was able to enter the US. On Monday, Reuters, citing three unnamed sources familiar with the matter, claimed that US deputy secretary of state Christopher Landau had personally instructed State Department officials to facilitate a visa for Ziobro.

Landau was made aware of Ziobro’s case earlier this year by Thomas Rose, the US ambassador to Poland, and believed that the Polish politician was being unfairly prosecuted, according to a further Reuters source.

Landau also reportedly pushed for the visa to be issued urgently, arguing that the matter was “a national security issue”. Reuters’ sources said that Ziobro was granted a journalist visa, something also previously reported by Polish media.

The day he fled to America, Ziobro was announced as a US correspondent for right-wing Polish broadcaster TV Republika, leading to accusations, now being investigated by Polish prosecutors, that the station aided his escape from justice.

Publicly, the State Department has said that details of visa decisions are confidential and it therefore cannot comment on Ziobro’s case.

On Tuesday, Poland’s current justice minister and prosecutor general, Waldemar Żurek, told broadcaster TVP that the Polish authorities are also “having enormous difficulty with our ally [the US] in establishing anything”.

Despite requests for confirmation that Ziobro is in the US, the circumstances ot his entry, and his legal status there, “we have so far not received a single confirmed piece of information”, said Żurek.

The minister added that he was “very surprised” by Reuters’ reporting. “If he [Ziobro] was indeed granted some extraordinary status, I would like our ally to talk to us about it, to see what evidence we have collected in Ziobro’s case”.

“We will do everything to bring Mr Ziobro to justice in Poland and dispel all the doubts he is currently fuelling about the fact that he is being prosecuted for political reasons,” said Żurek, who noted that he “has an extradition request ready”.

Both Żurek and Tusk today warned that extradition proceedings from the US are lengthy, complex, and often do not end in success.

However, the prime minister expressed hope that, “if we reach out [to the Americans] with full information about the charges against Mr Ziobro, then perhaps the matter of future extradition will be successful…It is unacceptable that someone [who] committed such evil acts could escape justice”.

Ziobro has consistently maintained his innocence and claimed to be the victim of a “political vendetta” against him by Tusk’s government. He has said he would voluntarily return to Poland to face justice only “when the rule of law is restored”.

“We are all well aware that currently, when the prosecutor’s office is being directly controlled by Minister Żurek, neither Zbigniew Ziobro nor anyone else can expect a fair trial. This is nothing but a purely political game,” Radosław Fogiel, a senior figure in Ziobro’s PiS party, told TVP today.

Last year, PiS’s narrative was endorsed by five members of the US House Committee on the Judiciary from Trump’s Republican party, who wrote a letter to the European Commission expressing “deep concern” about the rule of law in Poland.

In particular, they claimed that the government is “weaponising the justice system” against PiS in an apparent effort to “silence and damage” the opposition.

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/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 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.