“The defense files of one of the judges were taken, (…) as well as the judges’ private documents. Everything was packed into bags. The prosecutor wanted to return those defense files, but could no longer do so because no one could find them. Of course, we will file a complaint, a notification of a possible crime, and possibly also individual notifications” – this is how Dagmara Pawełczyk-Woicka, the head of the National Council of the Judiciary, described the chaos during the prosecutors’ search of the Council’s building.
On Wednesday, two prosecutors, accompanied by police officers, entered the National Council of the Judiciary, which houses the offices of the Disciplinary Spokesperson for Judges of the Ordinary Courts. The searches lasted over 12 hours. Prosecutors seized disciplinary files. As the media showed, after several hours of occupation of the Council, damaged doors, cabinets, and safes were left behind.
Dagmara Pawełczyk-Woicka, the head of the National Council of the Judiciary, who was a guest of Tomasz Sakiewicz on TV Republika today, described what the takeover of the Council by prosecutors accompanied by police looked like.
“It is not the case that I had any influence over whether to let anyone into the building or not. Direct coercion was applied – the state apparatus acted with force by introducing officers. A prosecutor’s decision was issued and addressed to the secretary, not to me. I only familiarized myself with the content of that decision, because I am the head of the institution and it was assumed from the outset that there would be a search. However, the decision did not contain any specific items that we were supposed to hand over, so a search had to be conducted. As a result of this search, which lasted over 12 hours, materials were secured that had nothing to do with the content of that decision,” the head of the Council recounted.
“The defense files of one of the judges were taken, (…) as well as the private documents of those judges. Everything was packed into bags. The prosecutor wanted to return those defense files, but could no longer do so because no one could find them. Of course, we will file a complaint, a notification of a possible crime, and possibly also individual notifications,” Pawełczyk-Woicka said.
The head of the Council admitted that her communication within the National Council of the Judiciary building was obstructed and that her deputy was denied entry to the building. “All the doors were manned by police officers, there were probably about 100 of them – an unbelievable situation. To me it looked like something out of a gangster movie,” she emphasized.
On the same day, a bill concerning the National Council of the Judiciary was being processed in the Sejm.
“As for what was happening in the Sejm – this bill on the National Council of the Judiciary, passed at breakneck speed – regardless of our views on whether judges should elect judges to the Council or whether those judges should have some form of democratic legitimacy, the law that was passed provides, among other things, that each voting judge has 15 votes. This means that a minority, if well organized, will elect all the judges to the Council. Constructing the law in this way is a denial of what they have proclaimed for many years. Of course, this is not about any democracy at all,” the judge stressed.