In the spotlight: Arkadiusz Mularczyk

In an attempt to postpone the Constitutional Tribunal's final decision on the new vetting bill, Mularczyk, one of the authors of the bill, reached for a weapon that never fails to hit its target - the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). He struck his mark and called into question the reputations of two respected members of the Constitutional Tribunal - Marian Grzybowski and Adam Jamróz.

Mularczyk sensationally announced that the two judges had in the past collaborated with the communist secret police (SB), despite their having declared the opposite just a couple of years ago. In his excitement, however, Mularczyk missed some important details. The fact that IPN has the names of the two judges in its records does not mean that they had been collaborators. In fact, the files revealed that Jamróz had refused any form of cooperation and Grzybowski had only been registered.

Regardless, by the end of the Tribunal's session the two judges had been suspended, a decision Mularczyk called a victory. "It's actually more like a great failure," commented Wiktor Osiatyński of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). "No matter what he calls it, what he did has nothing to do with the trial, it's a totally political thing," he added.

Ironically it was Marian Grzybowski who taught Mularczyk, a graduate of Jagiellonian University's law school, that the future of the political system could depend on him. "The professor used to repeat that it was us who were going to build the new Poland," recalled one of Mularczyk's schoolmates. However, Mularczyk may not have learned all his lessons well. According to Polish law, malicious falsehood is a crime - something the two suspended judges surely know.