Poland Finds the Wheels of Justice Turning Slowly

WARSAW, Poland —  Poland’s chronic inability to give suspects speedy trials turned into a blessing for five archivists charged with destroying secret-police records from the communist era.

After a decade of delays, court fumbling and a well-timed certificate from a doctor, all five are home free. A 10-year statute of limitations on the charges ran out, and the case has been dropped.

It is a frustratingly familiar story in post-communist Poland, where rising crime rates and the difficult shift to Western criminal-justice standards have confused and swamped the courts.

“I am shocked,” Aleksander Bentkowski, a lawmaker and former justice minister, said after a newspaper’s recent revelation of the archives fiasco. “I would have never expected that somebody could win a case by simply prolonging it.”

Such cases are hardly a surprise to many observers. The European Union has long cited Poland’s notoriously sluggish wheels of justice as an obstacle to the country’s hoped-for membership in the economic bloc.

Human rights monitors such as the Helsinki Foundation also complain that defendants wait far too long, often in crowded and unsanitary jails, for their days in court.

One defendant, Janusz Baranowski, just won a lawsuit he filed with the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, against the Polish government.

Baranowski, accused of embezzlement, had asked to be released on bail during the investigation, but did not receive any reply for five months. The European court ruled March 28 that the Polish government should pay him 40,000 zlotys ($10,000) in damages and legal costs for unlawfully prolonging his arrest.

Several similar suits from Poland are pending before the same court.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation’s liaison officer in Warsaw openly expresses exasperation.

“It takes such a long time before a court opens a case,” the official, Andre Zawistowski, said. “As a result, the proceedings become more and more difficult. People move around, so it is hard to summon witnesses. Their memories fade. Courts are not held in high esteem here.”

It remains unclear how the case of the archivists, who never spent a day in custody, fell through the cracks.

Media reports said that in 1992 prosecutors began investigating four secret-police archivists suspected of destroying 13,000 files on informants after the communist government was toppled in 1989.

It took three years to file charges. The case then languished in the bureaucracy until finally coming to trial last November. The first hearing was postponed, however, when a defendant produced a medical certificate saying he was unable to testify because of a recent heart attack.

A short time later, the statute of limitations on the charges expired, and prosecutors had to drop the case. The names of the defendants were never made public.

Justice Minister Hanna Suchocka has acknowledged that the statute of limitations, which varies depending on the severity of the crime, is in danger of running out on as many as 200 cases during the next two years in Warsaw regional courts alone.

Money is part of the problem. Courts are severely short of staff, offices, telephones and current legal publications. Suchocka even suggested that judges work in shifts to better use scarce courtroom space.

Courts also have struggled with the concept of fair trials after decades of a communist system that paid only lip service to the rights of defendants.

“This makes court proceedings much more time-consuming,” Bentkowski, the former justice minister, said. “It was so much easier to trace and punish criminals in the totalitarian system.”

Jacek Szreder, a judge in the northern Polish city of Szczecin, said fraud and other economic crimes, unheard of in the communist era, can be especially time-consuming.

“We have to handle more and more cases, and they become more and more complicated,” Szreder said.

Long delays in organized-crime cases have prompted media speculation about corrupt judges--an assessment dismissed by Wlodzimierz Olszewski, chairman of the National Judiciary Council, a national judicial watchdog.

“I think it is much more likely that a young, inexperienced judge who has to handle some 500, 600 cases puts the most difficult ones aside to make his job easier,” Olszewski said in a newspaper interview. “This is sheer negligence.”

To speed things up, some legal experts want to tighten rules that allow defendants to avoid testimony for medical reasons.

“There is no doubt that if we restricted it, we could speed up many proceedings,” Bentkowski said. “But of course, human rights activists would be outraged.”

On the Net:

Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights: https://hfhr.hfhrpol.waw.pl/En/