Polish bishop intervenes for hunger-striking politicians

The head of Poland’s bishops’ conference has urged a former interior minister to end his hunger-strike, after he was imprisoned for alleged abuse of power.

“I fully understand your reasons for such a dramatic form of protest – a hunger strike is a way of expressing opposition to government actions viewed as radically unfair, and a potentially effective means of drawing the attention of people who live by their consciences,” said Archbishop Stanislaw Gadecki of Poznan in his letter to Mariusz Kaminski.

“In order to demand justice, one must nevertheless be alive. For this reason, I am asking you to change your method of protest.”

Gadecki sent his open letter as a Polish court ordered that Kaminski and his former deputy Maciej Wasik be force-fed, two weeks after they were detained at Warsaw’s presidential palace at the initiative of Donald Tusk’s new government. 

They were ordered to serve out a corruption-related sentence handed down under Tusk’s previous administration, for which they had received a presidential pardon.

Gadecki said he had been asked to intervene by the politicians’ wives, and said he would seek their release with the current justice minister, Adam Bodnar, if they agreed to accept food.

“I am thus asking you to stop your hunger protest – which, after so many days, threatens not only your health but also your lives,” the archbishop said. “These lives have value for our common homeland and can contribute to making it fairer.”

Kaminski, a former head of Poland’s Central Anti-Corruption Office in 2006-2009, was jailed for three years in 2015 during Tusk’s last term in office, but pardoned the same year by President Andrzej Duda, who is close to the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party.

He went on to serve as interior minister in 2019-2023 in the PiS government, with Wasik as his state secretary. 

Their pardon was declared invalid when Tusk returned to power after Poland’s October election. Police arrested them while they were visiting Duda.

The president has declared that they are political prisoners and pledged to work for their release. He said last week they had been force-fed by order of a Warsaw court.

Speaking on Sunday in neighbouring Lithuania, Duda also accused the European Union of blocking funds for Poland in a “purely political action” designed to force it to reject the PiS government. 

Tusk returned to office on 13 December, two months after his Civic Coalition, allied to the centre-right Third Way and left-wing Lewica parties, won 248 places in Poland’s 460-seat Sejm lower house.  He has pledged to improve ties with Brussels and correct the alleged illegalities of the PiS administration.  

However, opponents have accused the new government of acting illegally in turn, by seizing key institutions, including state media, without due process. 

Tens of thousands of protesters from across Poland staged a rally in Warsaw on 11 January, protesting against the Tusk government’s early measures. 

These have included plans to legalise same-sex unions and restrict religious education, as well as steps to “separate Church and state” and end a fund which compensated religious communities for assets confiscated under communist rule. 

A survey last week by the Public Opinion Research Centre (CBOS) suggested Poles were divided over the Tusk government’s summary takeover of state media, with religious citizens generally opposing its liberalising policies. 

In a sign of possible divisions within the government, vice-premier Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz who heads the Tusk-allied Polish Peasant Party (PSL), told a meeting in Lublin on Saturday that the Polish Church had been damaged by its perceived link with PiS, but added that his MPs would resist any “revolution” and defend “values and traditions” linked to Poland’s “Christian roots”. 

A spokesman for the Polish Bishops Conference told The Tablet on Monday that Archbishop Gadecki had received no reply to his letter to Kaminski and Wasik, and had “no information [about] whether his letter in any way influenced their hunger protest”. 

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