Could former president Kwaśniewski face war-crimes charges? Courtesy of SLD

Polish prosecutors are considering bringing charges of war crimes against top government officials who held office between 2002 and 2005. According to Gazeta Wyborcza, the charges would concern secret prisons in Poland where the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was purported to have held and tortured prisoners.

The existence of the prisons in Poland was first alleged by Human Rights Watch and reported by the Washington Post in the autumn of 2005. In response to those reports, an investigative commission set up by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe published a report saying that such secret CIA prisons for terrorists captured in Afghanistan had existed in Romania, Lithuania and Poland. However, the commission produced no hard evidence.

At that time, the Polish government denied the existence of such prisons, admitting only to having allowed planes belonging to the CIA to land at an airport in Szymany.

However, Polish prosecutors started an investigation in 2008 after discovering a secret memo from Poland’s Foreign Intelligence Agency which seemed to confirm that such a prison had existed.

The investigation is “top secret,” but Wyborcza reports that the prosecutor in charge of the investigation has collected evidence that he intends to pass on to the speaker of the Sejm.

According to Polish law, the Sejm can decide whether to bring top government officials before the State Tribunal, a special organ set up to try top government officials for the most egregious crimes.

Since the State Tribunal only hears cases concerning officials holding the position of minister and upwards, suspects who could potentially be brought before it could include former President Aleksander Kwaśniewski and former Prime Minister Leszek Miller.