2024-10-31 21:13 update: 2024-10-31, 21:15
Photo PAP/Piotr Polak
The justice minister in the former Law and Justice (PiS) government, who has been repeatedly summoned by the lower house investigative commission into the wiretapping scandal under the PiS rule, has said the commission members will be held criminally liable for this.
Soon after taking over power from the nationalist-leaning PiS in December 2023, the pro-European government of Donald Tusk launched a parliamentary commission investigating the illegal use of highly-invasive Pegasus spyware by PiS against the then opposition politicians, lawyers and other figures criticising the PiS government.
The commission wants to question Zbigniew Ziobro, the former justice minister, on November 4. He has already been summoned three times to give explanations before the commission and excused his absence twice by providing a doctor's certificate related to his cancer.
Meanwhile, on September 10, the Constitutional Tribunal (TK), Poland's highest court, which the new government says was politicised by PiS by manning it with loyalists and former politicians, ruled that the scope of operation of the Pegasus commission was incompatible with Poland's constitution.
The ruling followed a complaint by a group of PiS members about the Sejm, lower house, resolution on setting up the commission.
Two former PiS members were among the three judges that issued the ruling.
On Thursday, Ziobro said that because TK by its ruling removed the commission from the legal order, its members impersonating a non-existent body "will be held responsible for this," referring to the summons.
He posted his last summons to appear before the commission on X with a comment:
"This piece of paper could even be funny, and its authors quite good jokers, if it were not for the fact that, according to the judgment of the Constitutional Tribunal, the members of this 'pretend commission' have just committed a crime under Article 231 of the Penal Code."
The former government, led by PiS, secretly purchased the Pegasus phone-hacking system from the Israeli NSO Group. Pegasus was then used to spy on opposition and government opponents, as confirmed in reports from Citizen Lab, a specialised unit at the University of Toronto, phone maker Apple, and Amnesty International.
As many as 578 people were apparently subject to surveillance in the years 2017-2022, according to the current justice minister, Adam Bodnar. (PAP)
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