Antoni Macierewicz Courtesy of antonimacierewicz.pl

The Appellate Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw wants to charge former Deputy Defense Minister and current Law and Justice (PiS) MP Antoni Macierewicz for disclosing state secrets, overreaching the powers of his office and making false statements in a 2007 report he published on the Polish Military Information Services (WSI).

WSI, a military intelligence agency, was disbanded in September 30, 2006 and replaced with two new agencies, the Military Counter-intelligence Service (SKW) and the Military Intelligence Service (SWW).

Then-Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński put Mr Macierewicz in charge of supervising the liquidation of WSI.

In his 2007 report, Mr Macierewicz accused WSI personnel, among other things, of disclosing state secrets, failing to notify authorities of criminal acts, obstructing penal proceedings, resorting to violence and illegal threats to carry out illegal activities, cooperating secretly with entrepreneurs and media, and reaping illegal financial benefits from their activities.

But Warsaw's Appellate Prosecutor’s Office has now filed allegations against Mr Macierewicz himself for disclosing secrets, overreaching the powers of his office and falsifying statements within the report.

If these allegations are proven to be true, and if Mr Macierwicz's immunity is waived by parliament, he could face up to eight years in prison.

But Szymon Liszewski, chief prosecutor at the fifth division of Warsaw's Appellate Prosecutor’s Office, told WBJ.pl that attempts to hold MPs to justice are “rarely successful.”

Although the report is still available to the public, Mr Liszewski said he could not disclose any information regarding which elements are allegedly false or should not have been disclosed.

The General Prosecutor's Office is now examining an application to waive Mr Macierwicz's immunity. “We hope that the General Prosecutor will pass this issue onto the Speaker of the Sejm, if it is not passed to the Speaker, then it will come back to the appeals office to make some changes, to refile it back to the General Prosecutor,” Mr Liszewski said.

The MP's immunity can only be waived if the General Prosecutor's Office and a parliamentary majority in the Sejm agree to it.

Macierewicz: this is revenge

Mr Macierewicz was the chief investigator for PiS's investigation into the April 10, 2010 Smolensk airplane catastrophe, in which Poland's President Lech Kaczyński, as well as 96 others, died. The PiS report claims that the catastrophe was an assassination and not an accident, as the Polish government's official report concluded.

According to Mr Macierewicz, the Appellate Prosecutor's Office is now trying to get “revenge for [PiS's] Smolensk investigation,” the Polish Press Agency reported him as saying. The inference is that the Appellate Prosecutor's Office is part of the state apparatus and therefore connected to the government.

“This is an attempt to defend the current system and proves that there is a communist lobby [in Poland]. I had always been aware of how influential this lobby is,” he added.

Kaczyński: this is political repression

PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński said at a press conference on Monday that the WSI was directly responsible for the extension of communist rule in Poland after 1989 and defended Mr Macierewicz by praising him for publishing the report.

He added that keeping WSI as an organization for such a long time after the transition was a “pathology.”

“If all of this becomes the subject of extreme hostility from the press, and then prosecutor action, then this is very sad, to say the least, and shows how much our current state is the continuation of a communist Poland,” Mr Kaczyński added.

Mr Macierewicz served as interior minister from 1991-1992.

Izabela Depczyk