Silencing Dissent Isn’t Defending Democracy—It’s Destroying It

In an act of political intimidation by the left-liberal Europhile Donald Tusk government, Marcin Romanowski, Poland’s deputy justice minister under the Law and Justice (PiS) government, was publicly arrested in front of cameras in July 2024, accused of misusing public funds. Romanowski was granted political asylum in Hungary in December 2024. He was appointed head of the Hungarian–Polish Institute of Freedom at its inauguration in April of this year.

The following is the text of a speech by Christopher J. Farrell, Director of Investigations and Research for Judicial Watch of Washington, D.C., delivered on April 26th, 2025 at the inauguration of the Hungarian-Polish Institute of Freedom at the Center for Fundamental Rights in Budapest, Hungary. 

Marcin Romanowski is a principled leader, unjustly targeted by the Tusk government’s lawfare tactics. The politically motivated charges and aggressive legal actions against him, including the misuse of state institutions to silence political opposition, threaten the rule of law. Such actions undermine authentic democracy and reverberate negatively across Europe.

I am Chris Farrell, Director of Investigations and Research for Judicial Watch—America’s largest and most effective government watchdog organization. Our mission is to promote integrity, transparency, accountability, and the rule of law. 

We often do so through legal action and public advocacy. The organization is just over 30 years old, and I have been the Director of Investigations and Research for the past 26 years. I am also a member of the organization’s Board of Directors. Our investigations and litigation are unmatched in scope and impact.

Mr. Romanowski’s case came to our interest as it aligns with our mission to combat public corruption and abuses of government power, particularly when they involve politically motivated prosecutions or ‘lawfare.’ 

Mr. Romanowski’s situation is a political attack operation masquerading as legal action —conjured-up to silence a prominent conservative voice—and cases such as these exemplify Judicial Watch’s concerns about governments weaponizing legal systems to suppress dissent. It is the definition of lawfare.

Unfortunately, this appears as further evidence of a broader trend across liberal governments in Europe—the trend to undermine conservative voices. Voices that often defend national sovereignty, democratic self-government, and traditional values. 

Poles have a right to uphold their cultural, religious and legal identity against external, supranational entities with globalist agendas. Mr. Romanowski, and other like-minded persons, have the right to express those beliefs without fear of becoming a target of the political opposition’s legal machinery.

In my experience, once you become the target of the organs of the state, the process becomes the punishment. The state’s goal is a dehumanizing repression of political opponents that the East German security services called Zersetzung. That was a psychological warfare technique to repress political opponents by smearing, sabotaging and disrupting a dissident while maintaining a façade of normality and legal order.

Judicial Watch has unparalleled experience investigating U.S. government targeting of conservative figures. We know all of the tactics—all of the tricks. Here are a few examples:

• Our tax agency—the Internal Revenue Service—targeted so-called Tea Party groups at the direction of the Obama administration  to suppress their organization and operations;
• The Federal Bureau of Investigation under the utterly corrupt Biden administration labeled conservative Catholics and pro-Life groups “Domestic Violent Extremists”;
• Parents who attended school board meetings to protest radical gender ideology indoctrination had their vehicle license plates recorded by law enforcement officials; 
• Our own current Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard (a former Democratic Congresswoman from Hawaii), once she placed her support behind Donald Trump for President, was—at the direction of the Biden White House—placed on a secret air travel surveillance list known as ‘Quiet Skies’; and then, of course; 
• There was the campaign to bankrupt, jail and destroy Donald Trump.

Liberal elites cannot resist using institutional power to suppress conservative, populist movements.

Such tactics—prosecuting political opponents under vague or inflated charges—mirror authoritarian practices.

A few weeks ago, at the Munich security conference, Vice President Vance made several key observations about European liberal elites. What he said was true and accurate. Of course, We could discuss various matters in Romania, the UK, Germany, Austria, France—but today we focus on Mr. Romanowski and what is going on in Poland.

Tactics that silent dissent risk a slide into ‘soft authoritarianism,’ where democracy exists in name only. 

We urge European citizens to resist elite overreach by supporting leaders who prioritize national sovereignty and democratic accountability. 

The message from your strong, true friends in America is this:

• When governments twist the law to silence dissent, they’re not defending democracy—they’re destroying it.
• If you let your elites jail your voices, you’ll wake up to a continent where the people’s will is nothing but a memory. 
• I stand with Romanowski, and I call on every freedom-loving European to stand against lawfare that seeks to destroy freedom of belief and freedom of speech—before it’s too late.

God bless Poland; God bless Hungary; and God bless the United States of America!