The Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, an international watchdog, will not issue a preliminary opinion on a bill on Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, before work on the new law is completed.

Secretary General of the Council of Europe Thorbjoern Jagland has asked the Venice Commission to hold off from presenting a preliminary opinion on the new legislation on the constitutional court, Council of Europe spokesman Panos Kakaviatos has told the PAP news agency.

During a debate on the bill in the Polish Senate last week, a number of amendments to the legislation were proposed, many in line with the Venice Commission’s earlier recommendations, the spokesman said.
The watchdog hopes they „will constitute a positive response to concerns expressed by the Council of Europe.”
Jagland, Kakaviatos added, „will ask the Venice Commission to issue an opinion on the bill once the legislative process is completed.”

The bill is still being debated in the upper chamber of the Polish parliament. Senate Speaker Stanisław Karczewski told Polish Radio on Monday he was „convinced that this will end the political conflict over the Constitutional Tribunal.”

A political stalemate over the country’s top court has made international headlines, sparking criticism abroad and protests in the country. The European Commission has launched the first step of a so-called rule of law procedure against Poland.

In March, the Venice Commission warned that the rule of law, democracy and human rights were in danger as long as Poland was embroiled in a constitutional crisis.

Innovation, boosting start-ups, cohesion policy and the EU single market will be among Poland’s priorities during its turn at the presidency of the Visegrad Group, Development Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has said.

Warsaw took over the rotating presidency of the Visegrad Group – comprising Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia – on 1 July. Morawiecki, who is also deputy prime minister, was speaking in Warsaw during a meeting on Thursday of Visegrad Group officials responsible for the economy.

The talks were also attended by the Bulgarian, Croatian, Slovenian and Romanian authorities. „We want to create a wider platform for cooperation with the countries of the V4. I know that our Czech and Hungarian friends have expressed a similar view,” Morawiecki said.

He added: „We were able to establish the largest public fund for start-ups in Central Europe, which has PLN 3.5 billion [from public funds] and PLN 3.5 billion from venture capital funds. I think this is a good platform for attracting attention to start-ups from all over Central Europe, not only from Poland.”

A lawsuit over a controversial German mini-series that depicts Polish underground fighters in WWII as being anti-Semitic kicked off on Monday in a district court in Kraków, southern Poland.

The case against German public television channel ZDF and producers UFA Fiction has been brought by Zbigniew Radłowski, a 92-year-old veteran of the Home Army (AK), and an international association of former AK soldiers.
The Home Army was an official resistance force that was subordinate to the Polish government-in-exile in London.
The plaintiffs claim the TV drama Our Mothers, Our Fathers infringes the personal rights of former Home Army soldiers such as the right to national identity, the right to national pride and dignity and freedom from hate speech.

They say the series contains scenes suggesting the Home Army was complicit in crimes against Jews, while Germans are presented as the victims of World War II. Those bringing the case are demanding an apology on all television channels which screened the series, or for the first broadcast on other channels that bought the drama to be preceded by a statement that Germans were the only nation guilty for the Holocaust.

The court rejected a motion by the defendants for the lawsuit to be dismissed. The court dismissed arguments that Poland had no jurisdiction over the case, ruling that a Polish court had the right and duty to proceed since the series was available in Poland.

Polish critics have pointed out that Poland was the one country in Nazi-occupied Europe that had an official branch of the resistance devoted to saving Jews.

Nearly three in four Poles fear that Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union will have a detrimental effect on Poland, according to a survey.

But the study by pollster CBOS shows that less than a half of the respondents are concerned with Britons’ decision to leave the European fold in a referendum carried out in June.

Forty-two percent of those surveyed declared they were indifferent to the outcome, while five percent said they approved of the decision.

Fears of a post-Brexit fallout for Poland are most prevalent among the best educated Poles, as 61 percent of the respondents with a higher education said they subscribe to such a view.

In a referendum held on 23 June, 51.9 percent of UK citizens voted to leave the EU while 48.1 percent voted to stay, a result that dealt a blow to the European Union and caused turmoil on global markets.

The vote has also sparked fears among some Polish experts and policymakers that Brexit could lead to a growing division within the European Union into a rich euroland group and poorer countries on the periphery of the bloc which, for various reasons, are not ready for further integration.

Ombudsman Adam Bodnar has referred Poland’s recently adopted anti-terror law to the Constitutional Tribunal, claiming multiple infringements of the constitution.

Bodnar says that nine clauses in the new legislation infringe the country’s constitution, alongside the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights.

The conservative Law and Justice government has said the new measures will increase the efficiency of Polish anti-terrorist operations and improve coordination between security services. But the law has been criticized by opposition politicians and human rights organizations, who called on President Andrzej Duda not to sign it, claiming the new rules will limit citizens’ rights.

The ombudsman’s 100-page complaint referred to the tribunal argues that the new law violates the right to privacy and freedom of communication. According to Bodnar, the new regulations are unclear as to the grounds for accumulating data on individuals, arresting civilians, banning demonstrations or disconnecting citizens from the internet. Another clause questioned by the ombudsman is one allowing for investigative operations to be carried out on non-Polish nationals without a court’s permission.

In an official response to the ombudsman, Anna Surówka-Pasek, undersecretary of state at the presidential office, wrote: „As a consequence of an undisputable threat of international terrorism, the improvement of Poland’s security through increasing the efficiency of public administration bodies has become indispensable, which is why the president of Poland has signed the bill.”

The ombudsman’s statement, meanwhile, reads: “Although the bill was motivated by a good cause – setting regulations in order and boosting domestic security – [the document] lacks precision and detail, giving special services free rein and unchecked power.” The anti-terror bill was adopted by Parliament on 10 June and signed into law by President Andrzej Duda on 22 June.

Heavy storms swept through the country on Monday, leaving toppled trees, blown off roofs, and flooded roads in their wake. Emergency services responded to 1,100 calls over the course of the day, with most interventions taking place in the central and northeastern parts of the country. Over 30,000 people had their power cut off due to extreme weather. On Tuesday, torrential rain and strong winds will continue mostly in the southwestern region of Lower Silesia and Podlasie, northeastern Poland, the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management has said.

During a Monday press conference, Prime Minister Beata Szydło commended last week’s NATO summit in Warsaw, calling it a “great success for Poland”.

Szydło said that the decisions taken at the two-day gathering has paved the way for a boost in Poland’s safety in the region. ”The event will go down in history as a summit that charted a new security map for the world,” Szydło told journalists. “It has bolstered Poland’s security. NATO forces will be present on Polish territory. All our expectations concerning strategic decisions have been met,” she said.

The NATO summit brought an outcome that Poles had been waiting for, for decades, Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz said at Monday’s press conference. “From the perspective of national interest and Polish history, the gathering is an event that entire generations had been waiting for, perhaps, since World War II, dreaming that we could finally feel safe,” Macierewicz said. “From NATO’s perspective, the summit has reoriented its structure and redirected efforts towards defending its eastern and southern flank,” he added.

During the two-day summit in Warsaw, NATO country leaders announced the Alliance would deploy four multinational battalions to Poland and three Baltic countries, which fear potential Russian aggression following Moscow’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

During the summit, NATO leaders also pledged to strengthen their cyber defences, and declared „initial operational capability” of NATO’s ballistic missile defence system. “This means that the US ships based in Spain, the radar in Turkey, and the interceptor site in Romania are now able to work together under NATO command and NATO control,” said NATO chief Stoltenberg said at a press conference on Friday.

The military alliance will help its partners fight against the so-called Islamic State, provide AWACS surveillance aircraft to help tackle terrorism, and will launch a new security operation in the Mediterranean named Sea Guardian.

NATO country leaders also declared the alliance would extend its Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan beyond 2016. They agreed to provide financial support for the Afghan armed forces and police until 2020, but said they expected the country to implement reforms.

On the sidelines of the summit, Polish Defence Minister Antoni Macierewicz and his Turkish counterpart on Saturday signed a letter of intent on expanding electronic warfare capabilities.
The summit, which brought 21 prime ministers and 18 presidents to Poland including US leader Barack Obama, was the largest such gathering to date.

Sometime in the 1960s my father, who worked at the registry of merchant shipping near London, laid out on the breakfast table four or five British ships’ logbooks for me to look at. He had quietly borrowed them for me, a keen reader of English novels, to see the signatures in entries made during the 1880s by a young merchant seaman, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski.

I have carried this memory with me for over half a century and still feel profoundly moved when I recollect it, however imperfectly. What I remember is that Joseph Conrad’s signature gradually changed from one entry to the next from Konrad Korzeniowski to Joseph Conrad, as he became increasingly confident of his mastery of English, a language he did not learn until his career at sea. He became one of our greatest novelists in English, and a folio edition of his entire works graces my bookshelf today. As a boy, I loved his graphic accounts of maritime adventure, laced with political overtones derived from his unusual background and culture. I am about to revisit them in my retirement.

I like to think that my enthusiasm for Conrad arose partly from my childhood memory of the Polish role in what is known as the Battle of Britain. When the Second World War started I was a 5 year-old living at Northolt, one of the key take-off sites for defenders in the arial combats that raged over London. As bombs rained on us, killing neighbours and destroying houses around us, my parents spoke of the exceedingly courageous young Polish pilots who protected us. I still remember when the Polish war memorial was later established at Northolt aerodrome.

“We are delighted to welcome Poles in the UK”! Read a touching letter from Polish Express reader

My wife Mavis and I remember our Polish friends from the past for their warmth and hospitality. We were once offered a British Council posting at the University of Krakow, which was extremely tempting, but pointed in the wrong direction careerwise. Since that time we have often regretted that we did not take up the offer, since today we should certainly have been Polish speakers, as would our two infant children of that era. Later, working for the UK Foreign Office I was briefly involved in cooperation between British and Polish publishers after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, with benefit to both sides.

Two weeks ago we heard an influential farmer near our home speaking on Radio 4 with huge enthusiasm about his 20-strong Polish workforce, how conscientious and exemplary they are, and how they work hard together cooperatively and seriously. He underlined their huge value-added contribution to our national life, the loss of which would be deeply regretted by many neighbours, employers, fellow workers and others if we were to lose it.

How Brexit shattered Poles living in the UK. Polish mother responds to the moving letter from Brit Simon Crow

This essay is to say to readers that many of us are acutely conscious of the important contribution which our Polish friends have made to our nation’s development and culture. It is deeply regrettable that recent government policies here have created a swathe of people in parts of this country who have been persuaded that these failures of government are somehow the fault of immigrants I think we are all too aware that this has happened before in another time and another place, with disastrous consequences for all of us. For me Poland has always been deeply associated with friendship and culture.

It represents a widening of the horizons of our decreasingly important small island. I am among many British admirers of that wider experience of the world and political ideas that Polish and many other immigrants have brought to us. Please stick with us, and do not be deterred by ignorance and prejudice. Never have the population of these islands been more in need of the broader perspectives and vision that others bring to us. We need to go on learning the lessons of history in a wider world.

Roger Iredale, Emeritus Professor of International Education, University of Manchester