Legal and constitutional calamities strike again

Freedom of speech or abusive tripe?

I have, as regular readers will hopefully remember, commented several
times on this blog upon the topic of the Polish constitution; mostly unfortunately in a critical manner. Well, actions conducted by the Polish Internal Security Agency (ABW) on Wednesday morning (18.5.11) at 6 in the morning have alas risen the position of the Polish President once again into controversy.

After a warrant issued by the prosecutor's office ABW agents and police spend three hours searching the flat of 25-year-old student Robert Frycz, leaving with his laptop and various memory sticks/disks. Bizarrely enough Frycz's lawyer Bartosz Kowalski says that Frycz was not a suspect: "(What is) Very important in this case is the fact that Robert is not Frycz a suspect." Kowalski differentiated Frucz from his equipment stating that the prosecutor's order had been to seize the
equipment used to mange and update the website : AntyKomor.pl which has
President Komorowski as its target.

According to article 135 of the criminal code any act of public insult of the President is punishable by unto three years in prison. The constitutionality of this article has already been challenged in the case of the late President Lech Kaczyński sueing ex-President Lech Walesa for calling him a prat in the newspaper "Rzeczpospolita". The constitutional tribunal is due to deliver its verdict shortly and this will hopefully be a final nail in the coffin for this ill conceived law. There are alas many similar laws which journalist Grzegorz Sroczyński lists in Gazzetta Wyborcza which go against the norms of freedom of
speech.Thankfully the president's office has come out against the law with Secretary of State in the President's Office, Sławomir Nowak, stateing to the TVN24 news agency that he did "not accept and did not like the use of security agency to police the internet and that if thus case was legal then there is a problem with the law and that it should be changed."

Regardless of the ins and outs of it, whether Frycz was genuinely insultive or 'satirical' as he claims, the case highlights a major problem with the legal system and has ramifications beyond Poland's boarders. Poland is at the forefront of democratic efforts to help Belarus change its system of government and 'rejoin' Europe. In Belarus, as in any other dictatorial regime, police raids and confiscation of materials are regular tactics used to intimidate opposition members. It therefore does not bode well for Poland's credentials as a critical
observer.

Whether this is a left over from Poland's communist past is hard to say; there are many aspects of Polish day-to-day life that appear strange to myself, an outsider, yet go often unquestioned by most Poles (see posts on Ids etc). However, an unquestioning legal apparatus which protects the 'sacred' status of the political apparatus is a long way from the true idea of a liberal democracy which most Poles envisaged in 1989.