One summer in 2017, 34-year-old lawyer Sylwia Gregorczyk-Abram heard a crazy idea.
A legal acquaintance, Michał Wawrykiewicz, sent her a message that he shared her concern that the Polish nationalist government was reforming the judicial system. He wanted to know how they convinced people that judicial independence is not an abstract detail, but a solid foundation for democracy.
“He had this crazy idea,” she recalled. “How to convince people, citizens, why judicial independence is so important. Ask celebrities, celebrities, actors to do this for us.”
Gregorczyk-Abram is the right person for this job. Since 2006, she has worked in the Warsaw office of an international law firm. She co-founded Constitution Week in Poland. This is an initiative where lawyers give lectures at school to introduce young people to the law. She called her friend Maria Ejchart-Dubois, a human rights expert and co-founder of Constitution Week, who in turn contacted Paulina Kieszkowska-Knapik, a high-flying expert in the field of pharmaceutical law.
The four people met in one of Poland’s biggest demonstrations in years. “People are protesting All over Poland On every street where the court is located. They instinctively realized that something was taken away,” Wawrykiewicz said. This was the spark for the creation of Wolne Sądy, the Freedom Court Foundation.
Instead of drafting legal documents and reading legal books, lawyers found themselves acting, writing scripts, and directing short films aimed at making the rule of law a reality. Ejchart-Dubois said: “Imagine you have a car accident and another driver has some contact with the politician.” “Will the court be fair? Or you are a victim of domestic violence and the abuser is someone Member of a political party.”
Kieszkowska-Knapik said that both cases subsequently became a reality. She said there are “hundreds of examples.”
Early films featured actors, entertainers, and writers, ranging from the host of the Voice of Poland Barbara Kurdej-Szatan to the Nobel Prize winner Olga TokarchukSome of the most popular songs are starred by Wolne Sądy’s lawyers: a legal twist is added to a scene in the Richard Curtis romantic comedy “True Love”; the children who play get nightmarish Christmas gifts; as a tribute Beastie Boys imitated a video of American police programs in the 1970s, rapped about the Constitution, destroy.
“This is a new concept for us to communicate through films, not writing articles, not books,” Gregorczyk-Abram said in a conversation with her lawyer colleagues in Brussels, where they are receiving awards from the European Parliament.
Anna Wójcik, a researcher at the Polish Academy of Sciences, said: “They are very innovative because they start to communicate with the public in a very attractive way. Of course, you can say that it is specific to people living in urban areas. The tasters are attractive… but they provide some accessible information about what is going on.”
These videos are just the beginning of a legal journey that will take them to the Grand Court of the Supreme Court of Europe and the European Commission headquarters in Brussels. Wolne Sądy’s lawyers think they help convince the EU authorities Initiate legal action Opposing the Polish government because the Supreme Court judges were forced to retire. This is an attempt by the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) to control the Polish Supreme Court.
The organization has filed dozens of cases in the Supreme Court of the European Union in Luxembourg and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. In a landmark victory, the European Court of Human Rights found this month that the Polish government had “blatantly disregarded the rule of law”. According to Wolne Sądy’s statistics, the Polish government has lost 13 of the 13 rulings of the European Supreme Court.
The organization also represents Polish judges who were forced to lose their jobs, including Małgorzata Gersdorf, President of the Supreme Court. The government tried to dismiss them but failed. Mandatory exit through early retirement.
“However, the government never followed the verdict,” Kieszkowska-Knapik said. “This is surprising. So after each case… we need another case.”
Part of Wolne Sądy’s work is to record every change that PiS has made to the legal system since it came to power in 2015, and summarized it in the report Lawless 2,000 days. It hopes to provide future governments with a road map to restore the rule of law.
Ejchart-Dubois said: “Every idea in our plan is contained in a European Court of Justice decision, so this is not our opinion.” “So this is why we started all these proceedings in courts, human rights courts, just for There is evidence and the coverage of the judgment.”
They are trying to persuade opposition parties to unite and support the road map to avoid bargaining with each other on the rule of law.
As PiS enters its seventh winter in power, all these unpaid work outside of their daily work is paying a price. “We are very tired,” Ejchart-Dubois said. “But we are like people with ropes: when one person falls, the others [step up],” Kieszkowska-Knapik added.
As Poland moves towards a member state of the European Union, all four of them begin their legal careers on more optimistic days. “We observed from 1989 that Poland is moving in the right direction, towards Western civilization, and we don’t want to lose it,” Wawrykiewicz said.
The Polish government is likely to let them continue to operate. The ruling party controlled by Jarosław Kaczyński is planning another reform of the Supreme Court. According to leaked documents seen by Polish media, the blueprint means that any Supreme Court judge who wishes to continue to serve must be approved by the government-controlled National Judicial Council.
“It’s too evil,” said Anna Wójcik, who observed that these proposals would make it easier to initiate disciplinary proceedings against judges. “Today in Poland, who initiated the disciplinary procedure against them? Critic of the government.”
Wolne Sądy’s lawyers will challenge any such plans on screen and in court. “If there were no such social resistance, we would be like Belarus,” Kieszkowska-Knapik said.
