(Warsaw) The Minister of the Interior of the previous Polish populist government, and a collaborator, wanted by the police to be taken to prison, have found refuge since Tuesday morning at the presidential palace at the invitation of the president.
“This is an unprecedented situation,” commented pro-European Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a situation in which “convicted people who must be taken by the police to a place of isolation choose another place of isolation, probably more comfortable, […] the presidential palace.
In December, a Polish court on appeal imposed a two-year prison sentence on Mariusz Kaminski, the interior minister in the previous nationalist government and his close collaborator Maciej Wasik, for exceeding their duties in a case dating back to 2007.
A controversial personality, Mr. Kaminski had at the time served as coordinator of the secret services and embodies, in the eyes of his critics, the authoritarian tendencies within the nationalist and populist Law and Justice (PiS) party, which lost power following the legislative elections in October.
On Monday evening, a court issued an arrest warrant against the two men. They claim their innocence, citing a controversial presidential pardon granted by President Andrzej Duda in 2015, which was subsequently called into question by the Supreme Court.
Elected deputies during the October elections, the two men saw their mandates canceled on Friday, which they refuse to recognize.
When the police arrived at their home in the morning without finding them, the two men appeared alongside President Andrzej Duda, himself from PiS, during a ceremony.
In the afternoon, they made a statement in the courtyard of the presidential palace.
“We are not hiding, we are here with the president, we know that police forces are gathered near the presidency in order to arrest us,” Mr. Kaminski told the press.
“If we end up in prison, we will be political prisoners,” he added, without specifying whether he and his collaborator planned to leave the presidency.
The head of the pro-European government, for his part, indicated that no one was going to use force against the presidency, accusing “the political camp that governed Poland for 8 years” of having caused “unprecedented legal chaos”.