Wheels of justice turn slowly -- if at all -- in Polish courts

Wheels of justice turn slowly -- if at all -- in Polish courts

By Magdalena Kulig

WARSAW (AP): Poland's chronic inability to give suspects
speedy trials turned into a blessing for five archivists charged
with destroying secret-police records from the communist era.

After a decade of delays, court fumbling and a well-timed
certificate from a doctor, all five are home free. A 10-year
statute of limitations on the charges ran out, and the case has
been dropped.

It is a frustratingly familiar story in post-communist Poland,
where rising crime rates and the difficult shift to Western
criminal-justice standards have confused and swamped the courts.

"I am shocked," Aleksander Bentkowski, a lawmaker and former
justice minister, said after a newspaper's recent revelation of
the archives fiasco. "I would have never expected that somebody
could win a case by simply prolonging it."

Such cases are hardly a surprise to many observers. The
European Union has long cited Poland's notoriously sluggish
wheels of justice as an obstacle to the country's hoped-for
membership in the economic bloc.

Human rights monitors such as the Helsinki Foundation also
complain that defendants wait far too long, often in crowded and
unsanitary jails, for their days in court.

One defendant, Janusz Baranowski, just won a lawsuit he filed
with the European Court for Human Rights in Strasbourg, France,
against the Polish government.

Baranowski, accused of embezzlement, had asked to be released
on bail during the investigation, but did not receive any reply
for five months.

The European court ruled March 28 that the Polish government
should pay him 40,000 zlotys (US$10,000) in damages and legal
costs for unlawfully prolonging his arrest.

Several similar suits from Poland are pending before the same
court.

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's liaison officer in
Warsaw openly expresses exasperation.

"It takes such a long time before a court opens a case," the
official, Andre Zawistowski, said. "As a result, the proceedings
become more and more difficult. People move around, so it is hard
to summon witnesses. Their memories fade. Courts are not held in
high esteem here."

It remains unclear how the case of the archivists, who never
spent a day in custody, fell through the cracks.

Media reports said that in 1992 prosecutors began
investigating four secret-police archivists suspected of
destroying 13,000 files on informants after the communist
government was toppled in 1989.

It took three years to file charges. The case then languished
in the bureaucracy until finally coming to trial last November.
The first hearing was postponed, however, when a defendant
produced a medical certificate saying he was unable to testify
because of a recent heart attack.

A short time later, the statute of limitations on the charges
expired, and prosecutors had to drop the case. The names of the
defendants were never made public.

Justice Minister Hanna Suchocka has acknowledged that the
statute of limitations, which varies depending on the severity of
the crime, is in danger of running out on as many as 200 cases
during the next two years in Warsaw regional courts alone.

Money is part of the problem. Courts are severely short of
staff, offices, telephones and current legal publications.
Suchocka even suggested that judges work in shifts to better use
scarce courtroom space.

Courts also have struggled with the concept of fair trials
after decades of a communist system that paid only lip service to
the rights of defendants.

"This makes court proceedings much more time-consuming,"
Bentkowski, the former justice minister, said. "It was so much
easier to trace and punish criminals in the totalitarian system."

Jacek Szreder, a judge in the northern Polish city of
Szczecin, said fraud and other economic crimes, unheard of in the
communist era, can be especially time consuming.

"We have to handle more and more cases and they become more
and more complicated," Szreder said.

Long delays in organized-crime cases have prompted media
speculation about corrupt judges -- an assessment dismissed by
Wlodzimierz Olszewski, chairman of the National Judiciary
Council, a national judicial watchdog.

"I think it is much more likely that a young, inexperienced
judge who has to handle some 500, 600 cases puts the most
difficult ones aside to make his job easier," Olszewski said in a
newspaper interview. "This is sheer negligence."

To speed things up, some legal experts want to tighten rules
that allow defendants to avoid testimony for medical reasons.

"There is no doubt that if we restricted it, we could speed up
many proceedings," Bentkowski said. "But of course, human rights
activists would be outraged."