"Government Watch": Crime and punishment

The picture is a familiar one: a particularly unpleasant crime is committed, involving the death of a policeman. The country is shocked and the next day politicians make public announcements of radical new measures to strengthen the police, including liberalizing firearms rules to enable them to shoot to kill with little or no warning to the criminal. Sounds just the sort of stuff any good right-wing politician would support. Except in Poland, it is exactly what the left-of-center government's interior minister, Krzysztof Janik, proposed following the brutal murder of a policemen by a gang just outside Warsaw.

The response of Janik, from the ruling Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) party, shows the extent to which the fight against crime has transcended political boundaries, and how a remarkable evolution has taken place in politics over the past 10 years. After 1989 and the fall of communism, the then-government followed a highly liberal policy on crime and punishment, partly motivated by a noble desire to allow criminals' slates to be wiped clean in the new order and partly by an overly sentimental worldview supported by the liberal instincts then fashionable among Poland's anticommunist forces. As the prisons opened, so inevitably did crime figures rise. That dramatic increase in lawlessness has been the hallmark of Poland in the past decade, further encouraged by an understaffed and demoralized police force as well as an inefficient and in many cases corrupt judicial system. Together it means that Poland's criminals have been able to build up an underground empire to rival the Russian mafia.

Attempts in the 1990s to reverse the dangerous trend of rising crime were met by cries of its inevitability and admonitions that any crackdown would be a breach of rights and hard-won liberal penal policies. A lone figure in the political wilderness was Lech Kaczyński, who became justice minister in the Jerzy Buzek government in 2000 and who began a crackdown against crime during his tenure in office. He got rid of liberal defeatists in his ministry, brought into his inner circle traditional jurists and crime experts, sought to push through a hard-line criminal code that would have restored to punishment its true meaning, and made the victim of crime the focus of concern, not the perpetrator. By the time he left office, resigning in the spring of 2001, Kaczyński was the most popular politician in Poland. After the elections, together with his brother Jarosław, he established the Law and Justice (PiS) party, which now lays claim to be the main center-right political force. That success showed the appeal of Kaczynski's policies, and the mileage that politicians can gain from being tough on criminals.

Yet at the time, Kaczyński was the focus of attack from all political fronts. He was never popular with Buzek himself, being too independent and as anxious to expose wrongdoings in the Solidarity Election Action (AWS) camp. Poland's left-wing and liberal media attacked him as being a right-wing fanatic intent on undermining civil liberties. And the SLD also was active in Parliament in blocking the passage of Kaczyński's crime legislation. The legislative package in the end was vetoed by President Aleksander Kwaśniewski himself.

Since the elections, the position of the ruling SLD party on crime has been confused. On the one hand, they have reintroduced a legislative reform package to strengthen the criminal code but there have also been a series of dismissals in the Justice Ministry of those officials most closely linked with Kaczyński. Kaczyński draft his proposals is long gone. Kaczyński's successor as justice minister, Barbara Piwnik, is much less politically independent of the prime minister than was Kaczyński and only last week she angered many parliamentarians by suggesting that she might review the system of allowing top criminals to escape sentencing in return for being witnesses in trials of their former criminal companions. That policy is credited with having led to a number of trials of Poland's top mafiosi, previously untouchable because of the inability to find witnesses. Now Janik has stepped up with the hardest anti-crime and pro-police proposals yet seen. Cynics would say that his announcement is an attempt to garner support for a government whose popularity is falling dramatically, through a policy that effectively costs nothing. But in practice it represents a sea change from the previous policies of both left and right in Poland, and the distinct silence from Poland's media is also a reflection of the popular mood in the country. If indeed Janik's moves represent a new consensus in politics, they are to be welcomed and supported; for the victims of crime in Poland, better late than never.

Marek Matraszek is the Warsaw director of CEC Government Relations. He can be e-mailed at director@cec.com.pl