Polish parliament strips deputy opposition leader of legal immunity

The government’s majority in parliament has voted to lift the legal immunity of Antoni Macierewicz, a deputy leader of the national-conservative opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party and former defence minister, so that he can face criminal charges.

Prosecutors accuse Macierewicz of committing crimes while acting as head of a controversial commission established when PiS was in power with the aim of re-investigating the 2010 Smolensk air disaster in Russia that killed then President Lech Kaczyński and 95 others.

Last month, Poland’s then justice minister and prosecutor general, Adam Bodnar, requested that parliament lift Macierewicz’s immunity so that he can be charged with two crimes relating to disclosing classified information. The offences carry prison sentences of up to three and five years respectively.

Macierewicz – who has long promoted the claim that the Smolensk crash was not a tragic accident, as official Russian and Polish investigations found at the time, but was caused deliberately in order to kill President Kaczyński – denies the accusations and says he is being prosecuted for political reasons.

At a press conference today ahead of the vote on his immunity, Macierewicz declared that what was being done to him was “in some ways even more terrible than what happened during the communist period”, when he was regularly detained as an opponent of the regime.

As a member of parliament, Macierewicz is protected by legal immunity unless a majority in the Sejm, the more powerful lower house in which he sits, votes to remove it.

Today, a majority of 240 MPs – most of them from the ruling coalition – in the 460-seat chamber voted in favour of stripping his immunity following a debate that was held behind closed doors due to the sensitive nature of the material in question.

Most of the 178 votes against came from PiS and its allies, as well as some from the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja), another opposition party. However, most Confederation MPs abstained from voting.

PiS and its leader, Jarosław Kaczyński – Lech’s identical twin brother – have long suggested that Russia was behind the Smolensk crash and that the then Polish government, led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk, was either complicit or subsequently helped to cover it up.

When PiS came to power in 2015, it established a commission within the defence ministry to re-investigate the crash. Maciereiwcz, who was then serving as defence minister, headed up the commission.

However, despite Macierewicz and Kaczyński repeatedly claiming over the following eight years that the commission had obtained, and would soon reveal, proof that the crash was deliberately caused, no conclusive evidence was ever produced by it.

In 2023, a new government – again led by Tusk – replaced PiS in power. It immediately closed down the commission, saying that it had been spreading “lies” about Smolensk.

Last year, a report by the defence ministry into the activities of the commission claimed it had wasted tens of millions of zloty in public funds. As a result, the ministry filed notifications of over 40 suspected crimes, including by Macierewicz and his successor as defence minister in the PiS government, Mariusz Błaszczak.

Last month, when filing a request to parliament for Macierewicz’s immunity to be lifted, Bodnar noted that the PiS deputy leader was still being investigated by prosecutors over 21 alleged criminal acts relating to his time heading the commission, including abuse of powers, falsification of documents, and obstructing criminal proceedings.

Main image credit: Slawomir Kaminski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl