Adam Bodnar: The Polish justice minister at center of political battle over rule of law 

WARSAW — When the opposition won power in last October’s general election it vowed that returning the rule of law to Poland would be a top priority. That promise is now putting Justice Minister Adam Bodnar on the hot seat.

Bodnar is involved in most of the battles against the legacy of the Law and Justice (PiS) party that ruled Poland for eight years and came under fire for trying to politicize the justice system, turn public media into the propaganda arm of the ruling party, and put its loyalists in control of key institutions and state-controlled companies.

That’s all being undone under the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk, whose point man is Bodnar, 47, a soft-spoken lawyer who served as Poland’s ombudsman from 2015 to 2021 (which saw him go toe-to-toe with the PiS government) and is now the justice minister and chief prosecutor.

“We must tread carefully and legally,” he told POLITICO in an interview held in his office in the ornate justice ministry in central Warsaw.

His first move on taking office was to sign a motion for Poland to join the European public prosecutor’s office. The former PiS government had refused to join — one of many conflicts between Warsaw and Brussels.

“The EU is extremely important for us,” Bodnar said. “Brussels is an instrument for good, not a destroyer, so we have a great loyalty to it. It can be an agent of transformation.”

His opponents accuse him doing the opposite — of running roughshod over the law and the constitution in an effort to purge PiS people from all positions of power and to eradicate many of the former ruling party’s policies.

President Andrzej Duda, a PiS loyalist who is turning into Tusk’s leading opponent, warned on Sunday of the “arrogance” of the new government leading to what he called “the terror of the rule of law.”

The list of fights is a long one.

Bodnar is providing the legal backing for the Tusk government’s effort to retake control of public media. Culture Minister Bartłomiej Sienkiewicz has announced their liquidation, and imposed new management which is trying to make state TV (TVP) more politically neutral.

“We had to liquidate public television,” Bodnar said. “This will probably take some time to resolve, but the biggest problem was how to end the propaganda. We want TVP to be even boring, just a normal pluralistic version of society. Public media should never be a party propaganda instrument.”

The old management, backed by MPs from Law and Justice, tried to block the new people from getting into TV, radio and press agency offices.

President Andrzej Duda, a PiS loyalist who is turning into Tusk’s leading opponent, warned on Sunday of the “arrogance” of the new government leading to what he called “the terror of the rule of law.” | Sean Gallup/Getty Image

Bodnar is also front and center in the ongoing battle over Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik — two PiS MPs sentenced in December to two years in prison for abuse of power. The speaker of parliament has ruled they’ve lost their seats due to the conviction.

The two men holed up in Duda’s palace before being arrested last week and are now in prison. The president insists that a 2015 pardon he gave them should keep them out of jail, but the Supreme Court subsequently found the pardon wasn’t legally binding as it was issued before the pair were convicted. That allowed a lower court to retry and convict them.

“The gentlemen were convicted by a final judgment, their mandates were ended,” Bodnar said.

Political war

PiS is rallying over Kamiński and Wąsik, holding a large demonstration last week, with top party officials calling the pair political prisoners.

On Thursday Duda appeared to backtrack and said he would pardon the two — but instead of simply issuing another pardon, he threw the issue to Bodnar, asking the justice minister to undertake an amnesty procedure and release the pair in the meantime.

Bodnar said on Friday that his ministry has started the procedure, which can take up to two months and won’t necessarily return a decision calling for them to be freed.

“At this stage, no other decisions have yet been made on how to proceed with the case,” Bodnar told reporters.

Bodnar has also angered PiS and Duda by removing National Prosecutor Dariusz Barski. Although the national prosecutor is ostensibly the deputy of the prosecutor general, PiS passed a law making his appointment and removal contingent on agreement by the president as part of a broader effort to cement party loyalists into positions of power.

Bodnar has also angered PiS and Duda by removing National Prosecutor Dariusz Barski | Omar Marques/Getty Images

But Bodnar identified a flaw in the manner of Barski’s 2022 appointment, with the justice ministry saying in a detailed statement that the appointment had been made “without a proper legal basis and had no effect.”

Duda and his allies disagree.

“Min. A. Bodnar is trying to remove D. Barski from the position of national prosecutor, which he has no independent authority to do,” tweeted Duda, who plans to meet with Barski on Monday and accused Bodnar of a “flagrant violation of the law.”

“The situation we have been dealing with since Friday afternoon is a situation that threatens the dignity of the prosecutor’s office and the ability to efficiently carry out very important duties,” presidential adviser Małgorzata Paprocka told Poland’s TVN television over the weekend.

Bodnar sees these conflicts as part of a wider battle to restore Poland as a liberal democracy.

“We have to get away from PiS’s competitive authoritarianism,” he said. “They wanted a new Poland that would be like Hungary, where law and media are political tools. There was a strong ideological dimension to it, the formation of a new elite following traditional values and with many benefiting financially.” 

The furious PiS reaction is part of the party’s “painful” recognition that is has lost power, the justice minister said.

“We are now using the legal possibilities that exist and the effects will be seen within the next two or three months.”