Poland has plunged into an institutional crisis after two deputies from the ultra-conservative Law and Justice party (PiS), one of them former Interior Minister Marius Kaminski, defied an arrest order by taking refuge in the official residence of the country’s president, Andrzej Doubt. Police have confirmed that both have been arrested, Reuters reports.
The Polish police received the order to arrest them on Tuesday, after a Warsaw court denied their request to suspend judicial proceedings against them so that they could preserve their parliamentary immunity and keep their seats.
Kaminski, convicted of abuse of power during the period when he headed the Polish Anti-Corruption Agency, was pardoned by President Duda – a supporter of PiS – in 2015, just after this party assumed power. However, the Supreme Court ruled last year that the sentence should be reviewed, after which he was sentenced again and disqualified from holding political office for five years.
Kaminski refused to comply with the decision and announced his intention to attend, despite everything, the parliamentary sessions and even “exercise from prison, if necessary” the right to participate in the votes. This led the president of Parliament to deactivate his deputy card, so that he could not access the Legislative building.
After the police confirmed the existence of an arrest warrant for the former minister, he reported that the agents had entered his house and “molested his family.”
Meanwhile, he went to the presidential palace, accompanied by another deputy in the same situation, Maciej Wsik, former deputy minister of the Interior, and from there he published several photos on social networks accompanied by Duda and the message: “I am not hiding, I am here, with the president”.
For his part, the prime minister, the centrist Donald Tusk, appealed to the president to hand Kaminski over to the police and end “an extraordinary situation.” He asked that, “with his worrying attitude,” he not “sabotage Justice,” stressing that “the crime of protecting a criminal can be punished with five years in prison.”
“Mr. President, I appeal to you: for the good of the Polish state, you must stop this spectacle, which is leading us to a very dangerous situation,” Tusk told reporters in Warsaw.
The prime minister warned Duda and “other leaders” of the party of the previous government that “they will be fully responsible for this: for sabotaging the Constitution, sabotaging legal provisions, ignoring judicial rulings and abusing power,” adding that will “personally” take care of solving the situation.
On the other hand, parliamentary sessions have been suspended until next week by decision of the President of Parliament, in order to avoid the “chaos” that, according to him, would be caused by the public arrest of the former Minister of the Interior on the premises of Congress.