“We may have to pursue legal avenues and consider whether the Court of Justice of the European Union should examine this matter,” said Minister of Justice Waldemar Żurek. The politician was referring to the fact that Zbigniew Ziobro has been granted political asylum in Hungary.
Zbigniew Ziobro Granted Political Asylum
One of Ziobro’s defense lawyers, in the criminal proceedings currently pending against him in Poland in the investigation concerning the Justice Fund, announced on Monday that his client, the former minister of justice, had been granted asylum in Hungary. Earlier, Hungary had granted asylum to Ziobro’s former deputy, Marcin Romanowski, who supervised the Justice Fund during the Law and Justice (PiS) government.
“When a country grants political asylum to an EU citizen, it is effectively asserting that there are countries within the Union that are undemocratic. Unfortunately, in this case, it is a country that has the greatest problems with the rule of law, today Europe’s closest ally of Vladimir Putin, and one that, in my view, wants to blow Europe apart from within,”
Żurek told journalists in Brussels.
“We will have to look at this from a legal perspective, but to this day we have not received any document, so it is not even known whether the former minister (of justice, Zbigniew) Ziobro – against whom the prosecution intends to bring an extensive list of serious criminal charges – has in fact received this asylum,”
he emphasized.
The minister added that he had seen Ziobro’s media statements, in which – as Żurek put it – “speaking colloquially, he obfuscated the issue when asked whether he had the document or had seen it.”
“This is a baffling practice. Neither the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs nor the Polish prosecution has seen such documents with their own eyes,”
the minister of justice stressed.
“We want to see the document. We may have to pursue legal action and consider whether the Court of Justice of the European Union should take a closer look at this,”
he added.
“If it becomes a practice that successive countries within the Union grant asylum (…) to EU citizens, then the common legal space will disappear. The European Arrest Warrant will become a fiction,”
Żurek added.
On Thursday, the Warsaw District Court will examine a motion for the pre-trial detention of Ziobro. If the court grants it, the prosecution will be able to issue a wanted notice for the former minister of justice; if the services establish that he is not present on Polish territory, the next step will be to initiate a search for Ziobro on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant.
Żurek said he would accept any decision issued in accordance with the law by legally appointed judges. “If it is unfavorable to the prosecution, the prosecution is aware of the available appeal measures,” he added.
Asked how the granting of asylum might affect the court’s decision on Ziobro’s detention, he replied that the two issues are not linked.
“We have also seen surprising decisions issued by Polish courts, where someone revoked a European Arrest Warrant against a colleague, a former deputy minister under Ziobro, without considering that the European warrant applies to the whole of Europe, while asylum is granted only by the Hungarian state,” Żurek said, referring to the Romanowski case. “This is completely incomprehensible and very poorly reasoned, but we also have legal instruments to counter this, and we will certainly use them,” he added.
“We are aware that in Hungary decisions are political and that, in reality, the leader decides, while the decisions of administrative bodies or courts are often merely a façade,” the minister of justice noted. He did, however, point out that parliamentary elections will be held in Hungary in April this year, as a result of which Viktor Orbán may lose power.
“The opposition, whose polling suggests it could take power, says there will be no protective umbrella for any criminals in Budapest. We shall see. We are rooting for the democrats in Hungary, but we are doing our own job,”
the minister of justice concluded.