Poland backtracks on Holocaust speech law
Poland suddenly backtracked Wednesday on a disputed Holocaust speech law, scrapping the threat of prison for attributing Nazi crimes to the Polish nation.
The original law, which was passed five months earlier, had supposedly been aimed at defending the country’s “good name” — but mostly had the opposite effect. There were widespread suspicions the true intent was to suppress free inquiry into a complex past, and the law was compared by some to history laws in Turkey and Russia.
The amendments, presented to lawmakers by Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, were passed 388-25 in the lower house of parliament with five abstentions following an emotional but short debate. The Senate later approved them as well.
The original version of the law Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki presents the Joint Declaration of Prime Ministers of the State of Israel and the Republic of Poland in his chancellery in Warsaw Wednesday.
had called for prison terms of up to three years for falsely and intentionally accusing the Polish nation of Holocaust crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany.
The ruling Law and Justice party said it needed a tool to fight back against foreign media and politicians who have sometimes used expressions like “Polish death camps” to refer to Germanrun camps in occupied Poland. Even former U.S. President Barack Obama once used such terminology, deeply offending Poles.
Polish authorities insisted that nobody would be punished for any statement backed up by facts and that there would be no criminal punishment for discussing individual cases of Polish wrongdoing.
But the law nonetheless sparked a major diplomatic crisis with Israel, where Holocaust survivors and politicians feared it was an attempt to whitewash the episodes of Polish violence against Jews during and after World War II. The United States warned it threatened academic freedom and that it would harm Poland’s “strategic” relationships.
Ukraine was opposed, too, because the law also threatened prison for denying atrocities committed by Ukrainian nationalists against Poles.