Poland’s former deputy justice minister has strongly criticised prosecutors after he was arrested for alleged corruption Monday before a court ordered his release due to his immunity as a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
Marcin Romanowski’s arrest on 11 counts of misusing public funds was branded an act of political intimidation by opposition figures.
Romanowski served in the previous conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government that was ousted last year.
In a statement sent to The European Conservative prior to Romanowski’s release, Polish MEP Arkadiusz Mularczyk said he planned to involve the Council of Europe, describing Romanowski’s detention as a “serious abuse of power” by the current Europhile government of Donald Tusk.
Following Mularczyk’s appeal to the Council of Europe, officials from the body began contacting Polish authorities, informing them of Romanowski’s rights as an elected official and adding that domestic law agencies in Poland had failed to notify them about the arrest.
Prosecutors had originally intended to keep Romanowski in detention for longer than usually allowed by citing the gravity of the alleged crimes, which include the misuse of public funds meant for the victims of crime.
Romanowski earned a reputation during his time as justice minister as an arch-conservative for his support of the death penalty, contrary to EU law.
Ironically, Romanowski had signed a motion at the Council of Europe in April opposing the arrest of Polish lawmakers by the Tusk government, months before his own detention.
Former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki was quick to take to social media to decry Romanowski’s arrest, describing it as a “strictly political action that deserves contempt,” and accusing authorities of playing up the arrest to create a media spectacle despite Romanowski’s wish to cooperate with law enforcement.
On his own Twitter account, Romanowski compared the actions of the Polish government to those of Russia and Belarus. There are signs that the government is ratcheting up state harassment of conservative figures in the lead up to next year’s Polish presidential race, seen by the Tusk government as an opportunity to crush the PiS opposition once and for all.
Polish politics has been in turmoil since the transition of power away from conservatives to a multiparty coalition government led by former Eurocrat Donald Tusk. Brussels has turned a blind eye to the actions of Tusk’s government and in February granted Warsaw €137 billion in EU funds for supposedly solving ‘rule of law’ issues within the country.
