2024-07-17 17:47 update: 2024-07-17, 17:48
Adam Bodnar. Photo PAP/Radek Pietruszka
Poland's justice minister and prosecutor general has announced that he plans to ask the European Parliament to waive the immunity of MEP Michal Dworczyk for allegedly obstructing justice during an investigation of the so-called 'email scandal.'
Dworczyk served as the head of the Prime Minister's Office in 2017-2022. In June 2021, the hackers broke into his private email account, which he was using for official correspondence instead of a high-security government service. Dworczyk's alleged email correspondence with top government and party figures, including the then prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, was then leaked to the media.
Adam Bodnar told a press conference in Warsaw on Wednesday that the motion which explains how Dworczyk allowed his email account to be manipulated during the subsequent investigation will be forwarded to the EP "in the near future."
"The immunities of politicians cannot mean impunity for people who broke the law," Bodnar said.
"If someone committed a crime, the prosecutor's office will work with determination to make them face an impartial court," he added.
Prosecutor Anna Adamiak, spokesperson for the national prosecutor, said in June that the Regional Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw had gathered evidence which sufficiently justifies the suspicion that Dworczyk had committed an offence by obstructing justice.
The obstruction allegedly involved granting access to his private email inbox to designated individuals and instructing them to permanently delete email messages sent from that inbox within specified time frames, she said.
The investigation into the so-called 'email scandal,' Adamiak added, is being conducted "on the acquisition of data in the form of logins and passwords allowing unauthorised access" to messages from the email inbox of Dworczyk.
In June 2021, Dworczyk said that state agencies had been informed following reports that his and his wife's email inbox, as well as their social media accounts, had been hacked. He argued that "the hacked email inbox did not contain any information that was classified, restricted, secret or top secret in nature."
However, in the years that followed, media reports indicated that the hackers had made public much of the information that concerned the then United Right government.
The prosecution of an MP, according to the constitution, is possible with the prior approval of the Sejm, the lower house of parliament. (PAP)
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