The replaced national-conservative ruling party PiS published a corresponding statement from the politician convicted of abuse of office on Wednesday on the X platform (formerly Twitter). Kaminski wrote that he considered his conviction to be political revenge. President Andrzej Duda criticized the authorities’ actions.
Duda said he was deeply shocked by “the zeal and brutality, both in legal, physical and media terms.” He will not rest until Kaminski and his former state secretary Maciej Wasik are released. Both are “crystal clear honest people”.
The case of the two politicians has led to an escalation of the conflict between the new center-left government of Donald Tusk and the PiS camp. Since then, the EU and NATO country Poland has been on the brink of a national crisis. Duda, who comes from the PiS, received Kaminski and Wasik at the presidential palace on Tuesday while the police were supposed to take them to prison. After several hours in the official residence, the PiS politicians were finally caught there and taken into custody.
Consequences demanded for Duda
Nobel Peace Prize winner and former Polish President Lech Walesa called for legal consequences for Duda. “The president helped criminals, that’s unbelievable,” Walesa told the Onet.pl portal. “The police should probably be sent to him to take him to another location too.” On Tuesday, Prime Minister Tusk Duda had already accused Duda of sabotage and cited a paragraph from the penal code that provides for up to five years in prison for people who help a criminal evade criminal responsibility.
A group of PiS MPs, including party leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, gathered in front of the prison in the Grochow district of Warsaw on Wednesday night. He described Kaminski and Wasik as “political prisoners” and demanded entry into the detention center in vain.
Two years in prison for abuse of office
Kaminski and Wasik were sentenced to two years in prison for abuse of office in an appeal by a Warsaw district court in December and were due to begin their sentences. Duda pardoned the two following an initial trial in 2015. However, the Supreme Court declared this pardon to be unlawful because the appeal process was still ongoing at the time. Duda emphasized once more on Wednesday that, in his opinion, the pardon was still valid.
