PiS leader won't pay for 'diplomatic treason' accusation
PR dla Zagranicy
Victoria Bieniek
25.06.2018 10:33
The leader of Poland’s ruling conservative party will not have to pay compensation to former Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, after accusing him of “diplomatic treason” in the aftermath of the Smolensk disaster, a Warsaw District Court said on Monday.
Jarosław Kaczyński (Adrian Grycuk/Wikimedia Commons) and Radosław Sikorski (Krzysztof Dubiel/Wikimedia Commons) (CC)
In late 2016, Sikorski filed a lawsuit demanding that Jarosław Kaczyński issue him a formal apology and pay PLN 30,000 in compensation to a charity.
According to Sikorski, Kaczyński’s accusations to Polish news outlets attacked his “good name, honour, and dignity”.
In the interviews for Polish website onet.pl and the PAP news agency, Kaczyński said that Sikorski withdrew an official letter in which he said the Smolensk disaster would be taken out from Russia’s jurisdiction, calling the move diplomatic treason, Sikorski said.
But a judge on Monday said that politicians, as public figures, were subject to scrutiny than other people and that Kaczyński’s accusation was within legally allowed criticism.
Under Polish law, any official representative of the state can be charged with diplomatic treason if they are deemed to have acted to the detriment of the country.
On April 10, 2010, a Polish plane carrying then-President Lech Kaczyński – Jarosław Kaczyński’s twin brother – and 95 others, mainly political and military top brass, crashed while trying to land at the Smolensk air base in western Russia.
An official report into the crash under the government at the time cited a catalogue of errors on the Polish side, while also pointing to errors made by Russian staff at the control tower of Smolensk Military Airport.
A Russian report placed all the blame on the Poles.
But the Law and Justice party has long challenged those reports and a new commission investigating the crash was set up after the party came to power in late 2015.
Last year the commission said the plane was probably destroyed by a mid-air explosion and that Russian air traffic controllers deliberately misled Polish pilots about their location as the presidential plane was approaching the runway of the Smolensk military airport in 2010.
Poland’s state prosecution service was investigating whether top Polish officials under the former Civic Platform-led government had committed diplomatic treason. (vb)
Source: IAR