To all who were moved by the weekend arrests in Warsaw regarding Margot, I recommend the report of the Commissioner for Human Rights on the application of preventive measures in Poland.
Among other things, it contains references to reports by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and the Court Watch Poland Foundation, as well as judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). This Court has repeatedly confirmed in its judgments the excessive, unjustified use of pre-trial detention in Poland, awarding compensation that was ultimately paid from taxpayers’ money, i.e., from all of us. Equally depressing are the conclusions from the two aforementioned reports, which in short boil down to the fact that the abuse of pre-trial detention in Poland is a systemic phenomenon, and pre-trial detention itself is in practice treated as the preferred, default preventive measure. This in turn is a violation of the principles on which criminal procedure is based, in particular the presumption of innocence. Not to mention the violation of the Constitution, which in Art. 41 guarantees everyone the protection of personal liberty as one of the most important human rights.
I will describe the practice of applying pre-trial detention in cases involving economic crime in Poland and the absurdities associated with it in a separate post.
Paweł Osiński
Attorney practicing in business law and white-collar criminal law.