Poland’s newly elected MEP Mariusz Kamiński has announced he will sue Poland in the European Parliament, saying he was tortured in prison after being convicted of abuse of office.
After arriving in Strasbourg for the first plenary session of the European Parliament, newly elected Polish MEP Kamiński used the moment to announce on Wednesday that he would sue Poland at the European Court of Human Rights, based in the same city, for torture he allegedly suffered in prison. Kamiński said:
“It is shocking that in the 21st century, in a country that is a member of the democratic (European) Union, one could speak of the tortures being applied against the members of democratic opposition.”
Before running for the European Parliament in June, Kamiński and Maciej Wasik, former ministers of the conservative PiS (ECR) government that will lose power in Poland at the end of 2024, were found guilty of abuse of office and sentenced to two years in prison. Their arrest sparked a wave of protests among PiS supporters who considered them political prisoners illegally persecuted by the current government of Donald Tusk.
Kamiński went on hunger strike during his detention, claiming that he was force-fed, which he described as torture. The prison service denied that it had violated the prisoner’s dignity.
Kamiński and Wasik were eventually pardoned by President Andrzej Duda, a former PiS member accused of favouring his old party. After their release from prison, both pardoned men decided to run for the European Parliament, capitalising on the popularity they had gained among PiS voters during their imprisonment. Both won their mandates and are now two of PiS’s 20 MEPs, representing a group of European conservatives and reformists.
Describing the physical abuse he said he suffered, he said he was repeatedly restrained with belts and that, despite medical contraindications, half-metre long tubes were inserted through his nose to feed him. Kamiński also claimed to have received a letter from Polish Ombudsman Marcin Wiącek, who allegedly stated that the force-feeding was unjustified.
