Zbigniew Ziobro

Zbigniew Ziobro

Zbigniew Tadeusz Ziobro (born August 18, 1970 in Cracow ) is a Polish politician , chairman of the Solidarna Polska party and Minister of Justice in the Szydło cabinet . From 2005 to 2007 he was Minister of Justice and Attorney General in the governments of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz and Jarosław Kaczyński . Under Beata Szydło , Ziobro was reappointed Minister of Justice in 2015 . After a change in the law in March 2016, he also became attorney general .

education

Ziobro grew up in Krynica , where he also graduated from high school. In 1994 he graduated from the Faculty of Law and Administration at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He achieved average results in civil law , but very good results in criminal law . After completing his studies, he completed his legal clerkship at the District Public Prosecutor's Office in Gleiwitz and passed the examination for public prosecutors in 1997. However, he never worked as a prosecutor. After graduating, he worked in the General Customs Inspection from 1998 to 2000.

Political activity

First engagement in legal policy

In the second half of the 1990s he published several articles on criminal law policy in the Rzeczpospolita . In 1997 he prepared a legal opinion for the parliamentary group of the ruling conservative electoral bloc Electoral Action Solidarność (AWS) on the decision of the military prosecutor to discontinue the case against Colonel Ryszard Kukliński , who had been sentenced to death as a spy for the USA in the People's Republic . Ziobro defended Kukliński in it.

In 1999 he was one of the founders of the “Katon” association in Cracow, which provides legal support to victims of crime by providing advice and providing legal advice. He also participated in the preparation of the Safe Krakow program of the City of Krakow. He also wrote a draft for an amendment to the penal code , which aimed to tighten the penalty for serious crimes.

Member of the Buzek cabinet

From March to July 2001 he was in the cabinet of Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek, Undersecretary of State in the Ministry of Justice and one of the closest collaborators of Minister Lech Kaczyński , who was also the Public Prosecutor General. He left the Ministry of Justice after Kaczyński's resignation. During this time, the number of provisional arrests in Poland had skyrocketed, the detention periods of detainees on remand had increased significantly, for which Warsaw was criticized by the European Court of Human Rights in 2007 .

Member of the Sejm

In 2001 Ziobro was elected to the Sejm for the first time for the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Krakow. He was a member of the committee of inquiry into the Rywin affair . In it, he was the author of a report that held responsibility for irregularities in the controversial amendment of the law on public media, especially with Prime Minister Leszek Miller , Deputy Minister of Culture Aleksandra Jakubowska , Director of Public Television ( TVP ) Robert Kwiatkowski and the head of the State Media Authority Włodzimierz Czarzasty saw. The Sejm adopted this report against the votes of the ruling Left Alliance (SLD) as the final report of the committee of inquiry. It was a heavy defeat for Leszek Miller.

In the local elections on October 27, 2002, he was a PiS candidate for the post of Lord Mayor of Krakow, but he did not even make it into the runoff election. In the 2005 parliamentary elections , he won another mandate for the Krakow constituency. In the same year he was also head of the staff for the presidential campaign of Lech Kaczyński.

First Minister of Justice

On October 31, 2005, he was appointed Minister of Justice in the government of Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz . At the same time he took over in personal union the Office of the Attorney General. He also retained both functions in Jarosław Kaczyński's cabinet until it had to transfer office to the new government under Donald Tusk after the PiS was defeated in the early parliamentary elections on November 5, 2007 .

Because of his campaigns as the top crime fighter, which were accompanied by the state media, Ziobro was quickly given the nickname "Sheriff". In 2006 he was awarded the title of “Man of the Year” by the weekly magazine Wprost .

But his tenure as Minister of Justice and Attorney General was accompanied by numerous controversies and scandals. In December 2005, for example, he instructed the public prosecutor in charge to present the PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński with investigative files about the “petrol mafia” for inspection. In 2008, the Płock District Public Prosecutor's Office applied to the Ministry of Justice to lift Ziobro's immunity to MPs on suspicion of abuse of office by disclosing the results of the public prosecutor's investigation to unauthorized persons. On September 3, 2008, Ziobro waived his immunity in this regard. However, a counter-opinion by the public prosecutor's office in his hometown Krakow exonerated Ziobro and the proceedings were dropped.

In August 2006, the brother Ziobros sued a Kraków hospital, in which the father of both had died a month earlier, for 250,000 zloty (approx. 62,500 euros) in damages for medical malpractice that would have led to the death. According to media reports, Zbigniew Ziobro personally put pressure on the prosecutor in this case. After the public prosecutor's office had refused to open proceedings twice - at that time Ziobro was no longer a minister - the process was finally opened in 2014. Four doctors were charged.

On February 14, 2007, at a press conference , Ziobro and the head of the CBA anti-corruption agency Mariusz Kamiński announced the circumstances of the arrest of the head of the cardiac surgery department of the Ministry of Interior Clinic, Professor Mirosław Garlicki , and informed that the doctor had been accused of bribery and manslaughter in 20 cases would. Ziobro said at the press conference: “Nobody will be killed by this gentleman anymore.” ( Już nikt nigdy przez tego pana życia pozbawiony nie będzie. ) The circumstances of the arrest of the cardiac surgeon, which was shown on the TV news, as well as Ziobro's sentence criticized by much of the press as a prejudice. On May 7, 2007 the court ruled that the arrest was illegal and Garlicki was released on bail. The court saw it as proven that the allegation of manslaughter could not be proven.

In December 2008 Ziobro was sentenced to pay Garlicki 30,000 złoty (approx. 7,500 euros) as compensation for defamation and to apologize publicly to him. He had to do this on public television after the main news show, a picture of a board with the apology formula was broadcast. The press speculated that the trial and the airtime it financed would have cost Ziobro around 300,000 zloty (around 75,000 euros). In 2011, the European Court of Human Rights awarded Garlicki EUR 8,000 in compensation from the Polish state for the circumstances of his arrest and the defamation by Ziobro.

In April 2007, a commando from the CBA was supposed to arrest SLD politician Barbara Blida for corruption in the presence of several television teams . The operation failed because Blida locked herself in the toilet of her house and shot herself there. In 2011, a committee of inquiry into Blida’s death recommended that the Sejm bring proceedings against Ziobro and then Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński before the State Court .

Shortly after his release in August 2007 in connection with a property affair, Janusz Kaczmarek , the former interior minister in the Jarosław Kaczyński cabinet, accused Ziobro of illegally wiretapping journalists and politicians and of abusing the public prosecutor's office for political purposes and against political opponents. The opposition factions in the Sejm then demanded Ziobro's resignation. On August 29, 2007, the members of the SLD applied for Ziobro to be brought before the State Court of Justice; However, this proposal was never decided because the legislative period ended prematurely. It is true that Ziobro was removed from office on September 7, 2007 at the request of Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński by President Lech Kaczyński and downgraded to Deputy Minister of Justice. But just four days later, he was reappointed Justice Minister and Attorney General.

MEP

In the 2009 European elections in Poland , Ziobro was elected to the European Parliament on the list of PiS . There he was a member of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy Group . He was a member of the Legal Affairs Committee and was also deputy chairman of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs and the Special Committee against Organized Crime, Corruption and Money Laundering.

According to press reports, Ziobro was stopped by the Bavarian police at Hof in February 2011 because he was driving at excessive speed and with two different license plates. Ziobro had invoked his diplomatic immunity as a MEP, after which he was able to continue his journey. Ziobro himself explained that he had borrowed the vehicle from its owner, who had registered it in Belgium a month earlier. In Belgium, one of the two license plates is issued by the registration authority, the other must be made by the holder himself at a private mint. The embossing point must have made a mistake, which is why the second label differed in one character from the original. He himself had not checked beforehand, “like an average driver” of a borrowed vehicle, whether all the numbers and letters on both plates were identical. He also denied having driven too fast.

Immediately after the elections on October 9, 2011 , in which the PiS again lost to the Platforma Obywatelska (PO) under Donald Tusk, Ziobro and the MP Jacek Kurski belonged to a group of PiS officials who criticized the allegedly failed campaign tactics Party leader Jarosław Kaczyński practiced; the critics were then expelled from the party. Ziobro and Kurski then founded the Solidarna Polska party .

In 2014 he reconciled with Jarosław Kaczyński, Ziobro's party ran in the 2014 local elections and in the 2015 parliamentary elections on a joint list with the PiS.

Minister of Justice for the second time

On November 16, 2015, Zbigniew Ziobro was appointed Minister of Justice by the new Prime Minister Beata Szydło , and three months later, following a change in the law that made this possible, he also became Attorney General. The former chairman of the Constitutional Court, Andrzej Zoll, called the merger of the offices of the Minister of Justice and the Attorney General unconstitutional, as it gave the government the opportunity to intervene in judicial proceedings.

In May 2016, he announced that he would be the chief prosecutor and appeal against the judgment of a Krakow court, which had rejected the application of the California judicial authorities for extradition of the film director Roman Polanski for the rape of a minor, and wanted to reopen the case . In the judgment Polanski unjustifiably benefited from a "celebrity bonus". Had he not been a public figure , he would have been extradited long ago.

In mid-October 2016, Ziobro announced the establishment of a committee to investigate the Warsaw reprivatisation affair ( Commission for the reprivatisation of Warsaw real estate ).

In February 2017, the Kraków Public Prosecutor's Office, which is subordinate to Ziobro, began an investigation into criminal offenses against judge Agnieszka Pilarczyk, who presided over the trial of the death of Ziobro's father due to an alleged medical malpractice in 2006. At the time when he was still an opposition politician, the Ziobros family had unsuccessfully applied for the judge's removal because of alleged partiality. The National Council for the Judiciary, the guild's highest body, protested against this attempted interference with the independence of the judiciary. The responsible doctor in charge was acquitted of all guilt by a Krakow court in February 2017. The public prosecutor, whose chief employer is Ziobro, continued to investigate against him; According to reports in the Polish media, a total of five public prosecutors were busy finding mistakes by the doctor and his staff. The doctor in charge told the Polish media that he and his family lived "in uncertainty and fear".

Ziobro had the controversial judicial reforms drafted and implemented in conjunction, which, in the opinion of the European Commission, violated the principle of the separation of powers , and about this also got into a conflict with President Andrzej Duda , who pushed through several improvements. Ziobro justified his legislative projects with the alleged need to remove old communists ( komuchy ) from the judicial service. But it was proven to him that he himself sponsored lawyers who were incriminated from the time of the People's Republic of Poland. In January 2019, the parliamentary opposition accused him of seeking Poland's exit from the European Union .

Ziobro was also responsible for the law on the Institute for National Remembrance , passed on February 6, 2018 , which criminalizes the "degradation of the Polish nation". The law has been sharply criticized by the American and Israeli governments. It also sparked protests from historians' associations.

In connection with a decision by the Federal Court of Justice of July 19, 2018 on the declaration of enforceability of a Polish judgment under the Brussels I Regulation , he accused the federal judges of having made a politically motivated decision. The background to the decision of the Federal Court of Justice was proceedings before Polish courts in which the concentration camp survivor Karol Tendera had sued the ZDF for damages for violating his general personal rights and his national dignity . The Federal Court of Justice rejected a declaration of enforceability of the Polish judgment, as this would ultimately lead to a violation of the German so-called ordre public : The Polish judgment would have obliged ZDF to pass off an external opinion as its own, which according to the Federal Court of Justice with the ( negative) freedom of expression from Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG is incompatible.

family

His father Jerzy Ziobro was an internist and director of the Krynica sanatorium . He belonged to the PZPR , but had also been a member of the opposition trade union Solidarność since 1980 . The mother Krystyna Kornicka-Ziobro is a dentist. She was a joint plaintiff in the 2006 death of her husband due to alleged medical malpractice.

Ziobro is married and has two children.

Web links

Commons : Zbigniew Ziobro  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Website by Zbigniew Ziobro
• Entry on Zbigniew Ziobro in the European Parliament 's database of representatives

Footnotes and sources

1. ↑ Portrety kandydatów. Zbigniew Ziobro gazeta.pl , October 17, 2002.
2. ^ "Sheriff" Ziobro becomes the Polish disciplinarian welt.de , March 4, 2016.
3. ↑ Portrety kandydatów. Zbigniew Ziobro gazeta.pl, October 7, 2002.
4. ↑ Wszystkie zdrady Zbigniewa Ziobry ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. newsweek.pl , November 2, 2011. 
5. ^ Sławomir Cenckiewicz i inni: Lech Kaczyński. Biografia polityczna 1949-2005. Poznań 2013, pp. 706–713.
6. ↑ Strasburg: Polska szafuje aresztami gazeta.pl , December 11, 2007.
7. ↑ Milczenie Lwa, czyli bohaterowie afery Rywina 10 lat później ( Memento of the original from August 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. newsweek.pl, December 16, 2012. 
8. ↑ Pojedynek w Krakowie. W niedzielę Majchrowski powalczy z Lasotą o fotel prezydenta tvn.pl , November 28, 2014.
9. ^ Zbigniew Ziobro Gazeta Podatnika , March 21, 2008.
10. ↑ Reinhold Vetter: Where is Poland headed? The difficult legacy of the Kaczynskis. Ch.links Verlag, Berlin 2008, p. 50.
11. ↑ Człowiek Roku 2006 - Zbigniew Ziobro wprost.pl, January 5, 2007.
12. ↑ Chronicle of a crisis zeit.de , August 16, 2007.
13. ↑ Jak Ziobro nie ścigał mafii paliwowej gazeta.pl , July 8, 2008.
14. ↑ Ziobro zrzekł się immunitetu ( Memento from September 12, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) gazeta.pl , September 3, 2008.
15. ↑ "Ziobro nie ujawnił akt ws. Mafii paliwowej" gazetaprawna.pl , March 13, 2009.
16. ↑ Szpital nie czuje się winny śmierci ojca Ziobry - ugody brak wiadomosci.wp.pl , 23 September 2009.
17. ↑ Czy proces w sprawie śmierci Jerzego Ziobry utknie? krakow.wyborcza.pl , May 5, 2014.
18. ↑ Już nikt nigdy tych słów wypowiadać nie będzie gazeta.pl, September 14, 2009.
19. ^ Sąd: Mirosław G. nie popełnił zabójstwa ( Memento of June 30, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Radio TOK FM , May 7, 2007.
20. ↑ Ziobro przeprosił dr Garlickiego ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. newsweek.pl , January 10, 2010. 
21. ↑ Trybunał w Strasburgu: 8 tys. euro dla dr. Mirosława G. interia.pl , June 14, 2011.
22. ↑ Klaus Ziemer: The political system of Poland. An introduction . Springer Fachmedien, Wiesbaden 2013 , p. 70.
23. ^ State tribunal against ex-Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski derstandard.at , June 14, 2011.
24. ↑ Poland: Mud battle instead of "Fourth Republic" spiegel.de , August 13, 2007.
25. ↑ Kaczyński i Ziobro przed Trybunał Stanu za sprawę Blidy? tvn.pl, June 14, 2011.
26. ^ Zbigniew Ziobro Gazeta Podatnika , March 21, 2008.
27. ↑ Zbigniew Ziobro on the website of the European Parliament
28. ^ Diplomatic clumsiness tagesspiegel.de , July 28, 2011.
29. ↑ Policja zatrzymała Ziobrę. Polityk odpowiada onet.pl , July 30, 2011.
30. ↑ Farewell to the Sheriff and Bull Terrier faz.net, November 6, 2011.
31. ^ New right-wing party founded derstandart.at , March 24, 2012.
32. ↑ "Jedność staje się faktem". Kaczyński, Ziobro, Gowin porozumieli się tvp.info , July 19, 2014.
33. ^ "Sheriff" Ziobro becomes the Polish disciplinarian welt.de, March 4, 2016.
34. ↑ Andrzej Zoll: Never rozumiem Kaczyńskiego. Obywatel został sam onet.pl, January 26, 2017.
35. ↑ Poland starts proceedings against Polanski , diepresse.com , May 31, 2016.
36. ↑ Prokuratura wszczęła śledztwo ws. sędzi prowadzącej proces dot. śmierci ojca Zbigniewa Ziobry onet.pl, February 6, 2017.
37. ↑ Czy proces w sprawie śmierci Jerzego Ziobry utknie? krakow.wyborcza.pl , May 5, 2014.
38. ↑ Kontrowersje wokół śledztwa dot. śmierci ojca Ziobry. Prawnicy komentują onet.pl , February 7, 2017.
39. ↑ Skazany na wyrok. Jak polskie państwo osacza lekarza, który leczył ojca Zbigniewa Ziobry onet.pl , December 10, 2017.
40. ↑ Prof. Dariusz Dudek po kolejnej rozprawie w sprawie śmierci Jerzego Ziobry: ja i moja rodzina żyjemy w niepewności i strachu , onet.pl , November 8, 2018.
41. ^ What bothers Brussels about the Polish judicial reform mdr.de , December 20, 2017.
42. ↑ Ziobro bierze się za swoich Tygodnik Powszechny , May 20, 2018, p. 7.
43. ↑ Wszyscy komuniści Ziobry , onet.pl , November 19, 2018.
44. ↑ PO-KO złożyło wniosek o wotum nieufności wobec Zbigniewa Ziobro , onet.pl , January 23, 2019.
45. ↑ Andrzej Stankiewicz, Komiwojażer dobrej zmiany, in: Tygodnik Powszechny , September 9, 2018, p. 22.
46. ^ Lawsuit from Poland against ZDF - "For us this is one big scandal" . In: Deutschlandfunk . ( deutschlandfunk.de [accessed on September 16, 2018]).
47. ^ Resolution of the IX. Civil Senate of July 19, 2018 - IX ZB 10/18 -. Retrieved September 16, 2018 . 
48. ^ Legal dispute with the ZDF: Polish concentration camp survivor wants to turn on EU justice . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed September 16, 2018]).
49. ↑ Federal Court of Justice. Retrieved September 16, 2018 . 
50. ↑ Katarzyna Surmiak-Domańska, “Ziobro samego siebie. Rozmowa ze Zbigniewem Ziobrą, ministrem sprawiedliwości “Duży Format, Gazeta Wyborcza , December 12, 2005.
51. ↑ Kontrowersje wokół śledztwa dot. śmierci ojca Ziobry. Prawnicy komentują onet.pl , February 7, 2017.
52. ^ Zbigniew Ziobro website of the Polish Ministry of Justice.