May 6, 2019
Two months ago Armin von Bogdandy and Luke Dimitrios Spieker highlighted the plight of our colleague Wojciech Sadurski, a distinguished professor of law at the Universities of Sydney and Warsaw, and formerly at the European University Institute in Florence. Professor Sadurski finds himself facing an array of charges and lawsuits in Poland for his outspoken criticism of the governing party, PiS. As von Bogdandy and Spieker pointed out, such attempts to silence critics are not solely a matter of Polish law but also of European Union law and European human rights law, particularly in the context of the ongoing Article 7 TEU procedure against Poland. But matters have continued to worsen since that time for Sadurski, who has been targeted by no less than three sets of legal proceedings aimed at silencing him and punishing him for speaking out. We write to draw attention to the legal harassment of Professor Sadurski by the Polish government and its allies, to the right of academics across the European Union to freely speak out and to criticize political leaders, and to publicly express our support for Wojciech Sadurksi.
The background is this: On 10 November 2018 Wojciech Sadurski called upon Polish citizens to boycott a so-called “Independence March” to be held in Warsaw. He tweeted: “If anyone still had any doubts, after the maneuver of the past two days this much should be clear: no honest person should go in a parade of defenders of the White race, who have hidden for a moment their “falangas” [a neo-Nazi symbol] and swastikas, in collusion with an organized criminal group PiS”. On 13 January 2019, shortly after the murder of Gdańsk Mayor Mr Paweł Adamowicz, Sadurski tweeted that a politician was killed after he had been hounded by government media, and stated that no democrat and opposition politician should enter the premises of TVP, a public television station, which he described as a Goebbelsian media company.
These two tweets led to three currently pending cases.
…
https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/444364-sadurski-chce-przy-pomocy-ustawy-zrobic-czystki-w-tvp (POLSKI)
https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/444011-kaczynski-i-faszyzm-szokujace-slowa-pupila-kasty (POLSKI)
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wojciech_Sadurski (POLSKI)
-devrait-se-deplacer-au-palais-de-justice-de-lons-le-saunier-ce-lundi-apres-midi-avec-son-avocat-jean-baptiste-euvrard-photo-maxime-courche-1557135427.jpg)
IAPL Monitoring Committee on Attacks on Lawyers 