Robert Frycz, author of the blog AntyKomor.pl, has become Poland’s most famous blogger, and the center of a debate on free speech. According to Mr Frycz, the blog was dedicated to “political satire” aimed at Polish President Bronisław Komorowski.

But according to the Internal Security Agency (ABW), whose agents stormed the 25-year-old student’s house at 6 am and confiscated his laptop and hard disks, the website contained “materials that insult the president of Poland, and which may incite people to commit a crime.”

The website, explained the ABW spokesperson in a statement, included games in which one could throw various objects (including a hammer and feces) at an image of the face of the president. According to Article 135 of the Polish Penal Code, insulting the president is a public offense punishable by up to three years in prison.

The president and the prime minister’s offices have expressed surprise at the news.
“ I believe that self-irony is absolutely necessary in politics,” said Mr Komorowski in an interview posted on his website. “Of course you can make fun of politicians.”

Flawed law

Both offices said that the security agents were only following vague laws and were not to blame.

“If the law in this regard is flawed, it must be corrected. Freedom of expression is a supreme value in Poland … it is the foundation of a democratic state,” Sławomir Nowak, Secretary of State in the President’s Office, told TVN24

AntyKomor.pl, which will not reopen and is not up for sale, was not defamatory, maintains its author.

“Preventive censorship is characteristic of an authoritarian system,” said the blogger in a statement on his website.

Mr Frycz explained that the main motivation behind AntyKomor.pl was to show the flipside of the president’s own methods, which he described as, “the permanent and deliberate efforts to ridicule the person of the late Lech Kaczyński and his brother, Jarosław Kaczyński.”

MEPs from the opposition party Law and Justice (PiS) say the ABW had overstepped its authority and have asked for an investigation.

Dominika Bychawska-Siniarska, program coordinator at the Observatory of Media Freedom at the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, said that the case displayed a notable lack of proportionality between offense and action.

“The ABW is meant to act in really important crimes like drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime, and that obviously wasn’t the case,” she said.