Polish president moves to pardon jailed ex-ministers, deepening turmoil

WARSAW (Reuters) – Poland’s president said on Thursday he had started proceedings to pardon two of the last government’s ministers who were jailed this week for abuse of power, escalating his standoff with the new administration.

The announcement by President Andrzej Duda – an ally of the last government – was the latest twist in a saga that has left the country in political turmoil since power passed to a new pro-European coalition after October elections.

Former Interior Minister Mariusz Kaminski and his deputy Maciej Wasik were arrested on Tuesday in a high-profile raid on the presidential palace and taken to prison.

The public detentions come against the backdrop of new Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s efforts to undo policies of his predecessor – the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party – and punish those accused of wrongdoing during its time in power.

After the arrests, Duda said he was outraged and “would not rest” until Kaminski and Wasik were freed.

“I decided to initiate pardon proceedings,” the president told a news conference on Thursday. He said he was applying to the prosecutor general to suspend the men’s’ sentences.

As he spoke, thousands of PiS supporters gathered in the capital Warsaw to protest against the detention of the former ministers and reforms of state media under the new government.

The dispute between the president and the new head of government, and the ensuing legal entanglements, has laid bare what some lawyers say is chaos in the judicial system.

It was the second time Duda had moved to pardon the pair over the same case.

Kaminski and Wasik were first convicted of abuse of power in 2015 for allowing agents under to use entrapment in an investigation. They denied wrongdoing and in 2015 were pardoned by Duda, allowing them to take up their government posts.

Last year, after Tusk came to power, the Supreme Court said the case should be reopened and Kaminski and Wasik were sentenced by a lower court in December to two years in prison.

They were not immediately sent to prison as a legal dispute played out over whether they had lost their immunity to prosecution as members of parliament.

The former PiS government introduced reforms during its eight years in power that critics say undermined the independence of the courts and threw the judicial system into disarray.

Tusk’s new government is trying to undo these reforms to unblock billions in funds that the European Union frozen in reaction to the last government’s policies.

(Reporting by Alan Charlish, Pawel Florkiewicz; Editing by Andrfew Heavens)