In the new issue of „Sieci”, Wojciech Biedroń unveils the primary goals of the activities of Tomasz Szmydt, a fugitive to Belarus - a Polish judge working for Belarusian intelligence, for years acting on behalf of his actual superiors. One of his most important missions was to torpedo the reform of the judiciary and discredit its authors.

Escape of a judge

Tomasz Szmydt’s flight to Belarus has triggered a wave of commentary on all sides of the political scene. The majority of commentators have no doubt that the judge, who is seeking political asylum, has been working for Lukashenko’s intelligence service for years. Wojciech Biedroń, in his article ‘The secret mission of Lukashenko’s spy’, notes that the overriding aim of his actions was to sabotage judicial reform and to divide the reformist faction within the judiciary. The destabilising tasks of Tomasz Szmydt can be best seen in the so-called ‘hejter affair’.

Tomasz Szmydt’s wife at the time, Emilia, provides the media with the manipulated and unreliable content of the judges’ conversations they had in one of the popular communicators, and this leads to a massive tussle in the ministry. The deputy minister’s seat is lost to judge Łukasz Piebiak, but this is not the end of the earthquake. This case has de facto shattered further attempts to reform the judiciary. Some experienced judges who wanted the ‘caste’ to stop strangling the judicial system, which had changed little since the fall of the People’s Republic, left the ministry. Since the outbreak of the affair, the sanitation of the judiciary has been dying down. The reformist community is intimidated. Dirty, secret police methods of infiltration and the handing over of judges’ private correspondence to the media paralyse the reformist drive. Today our interviewees are convinced that it was the actions of the Szmydt couple that triggered the affair.

This thesis is also supported by Łukasz Piebiak, former deputy minister of justice.

He was creating himself as a supporter of changes in the judiciary, of the reforms we were carrying out. I think he was acting on behalf of foreign services in the area of jurisprudence in the Voivodship Administrative Court in Warsaw. His other task may have been to monitor the activities of officials in the Ministry of Justice. I believe that there is a large group of judges and prosecutors in Poland who were once linked to the special services of the communist era or to foreign services

— claims judge Łukasz Piebiak.

Kierwiński’s bad luck day

Dorota Łosiewicz, in her article ‘Minister Kierwiński’s bad luck day’, writes about the former Minister of the Interior and Administration’s speech on the occasion of the Central Fireman’s Day celebrations. It triggered a wave of comments suggesting that the minister was indisposed due to alcohol consumption. The minister himself explained the problems during the speech by, among other things, echoing.

However, apparently the minister and his advisors decided that the situation was so serious that such an excuse would not be sufficient and Kierwiński was taken to the District Police Station on Malczewskiego Street in Mokotow for a sobriety test. At 15.31 on the X platform, the head of the Interior Ministry posted: „Before you pass judgment, listen to my statements I gave to the media after the speech. Not only that, I immediately went to the police station where I was tested with a breathalyser. The result = 0.0. What happened at the ceremony was due to technical issues and echo”. (…)

Apparently, the minister’s emergency staff decided that even this explanation was not sufficient, because on Monday on Radio ZET Kierwiński stated that after the breathalyser test he still underwent a blood test at the MSWiA hospital

— writes the publicist.

Kierwiński’s blunder will certainly not be quickly forgotten by the public. It is also impossible not to notice that interesting incidents have also been happening recently to other politicians in the coalition government.

Minister of Culture Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz did not appear at last Monday’s press conference, which he himself had called for 11 a.m. earlier. Just before the scheduled meeting with the media, it turned out that the minister was not in the building and the conference was cancelled. „A difficult Monday,” journalists commented. (…) Well, but nobody said that working in government would be easy. Maybe that’s why ministers are so keen to work in the European Parliament. Public scrutiny will be much weaker there

• sums up Łosiewicz.

Interview with Adam Bielan

Adam Bielan, Law and Justice politician and Member of the European Parliament, in an interview with Michał Karnowski (‘We will return to power’) comments, among other things, on the almost six-month rule of the 13 December coalition:

We have a smiling Poland. A Poland with a devastated prosecutor’s office, ruined public media, no higher tax-free amount, no fuel at PLN 5.19. On top of that, there are horror bills and gigantic increases for gas from July. As if that wasn’t enough, one of the first decisions of the Tusk government, taken as early as 20 December, was to approve the EU migration pact. What awaits us are thousands of illegal migrants or gigantic fines amounting to more than 40,000 euros for each person not accepted. This is what a smiling, law-abiding Poland looks like under the coalition of 13 December

— points out Bielan.

What else in the new issue of ‘Sieci’?

Also worth reading are the articles: Piotr Gursztyn’s ‘Tusk’s method’, Konrad Kołodziejski’s ‘The politics of underdevelopment’, Stanisław Janecki’s ‘Fiasco of the great escape’, Marek Budzisz’s ‘Intervention of NATO countries in Ukraine’, Dariusz Matuszak’s ‘Quo vadis, Europe’, Jan Rokita’s ’ No move without Giorgia (about coalition games in the European Union)’, Maciej Walaszczyk’s ‘Forbidden theory’.

Moreover, the weekly also contains commentaries on current events by Krzysztof Feusette, Dorota Łosiewicz, Samuel Pereira, Bronisław Wildstein, Marta Kaczyńska-Zielińska, Wojciech Reszczyński, Aleksander Nalaskowski, Andrzej Rafał Potocki, Ryszard Czarnecki, Katarzyna and Andrzej Zybertowicz.

Read more in the new issue of the weekly „Sieci”. Articles published in the current issue are available online from 13 May as part of the subscription to the Sieć Przyjaciół.

You are also invited to watch the programme of wPolsce.pl television:

Tłum. K.J.