Lawyers take on Law and Justice

Last week Ziobro was joined by party bigwigs - PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński and the head of PiS' parliamentary club Przemysław Gosiewski - in attacking the entire legal community. Kaczyński lambasted the Constitutional Tribunal for discontinuing a case on the secret service's surveillance of the political right in the early 1990s as a "shameful and cowardly episode in the Tribunal's history."

During a parliamentary debate on the Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA), Gosiewski said that the activities of the Polish Bar Association (NRA) could be of interest to the new organization. He then refused to apologize to the NRA, saying that he knows of many corruption cases during bar exams.

The Minister's campaign to sharpen the criminal code made him the most popular Minister in Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz's government, but drew sharp criticism from the legal community. Some lawyers claim that tight regulations rarely lead to any drop in the crime rate, while Ziobro portrays lawyers as opponents of penalizing criminals. The divide was deepened when the Criminal Law Codification Commission dissolved itself following the dismissal of its chairman, Professor Stanisław Waltoś, who didn't agree with the Minister's policy. Furthermore, the Minister proposed regulations which would significantly reduce lawyers' and judges' immunities, introduce property declarations for those working in these fields and make public the disciplinary procedures in legal firms.

The Minister claims that lawyers in Poland have the widest immunity amongst all European countries, often leading to misuse of the right.