Update 21.32: The Polish prosecutor’s office announced on Monday that it had opened an investigation into espionage, after judge Tomasz Szmydt requested political asylum in Belarus citing that he fears a “fabricated espionage scandal” in Poland, AFP reports, News.ro reports.
Original article:
A top Polish judge requested political asylum in Belarus on Monday, saying he was doing so in “protest against Poland’s unfair and harmful policy” toward Belarus and Russia, Politico reports.
In his resignation letter published on X, Tomasz Szmydt said he was resigning as a judge at the Warsaw Administrative Court “with immediate effect”.
Szmydt motivated his decision as a protest against “activities pushing my country towards a direct military conflict” with Belarus and Russia, and called on the Polish authorities to “normalize” and establish “good neighborly relations” with Minsk and Moscow.
The judge also appeared at a news conference in Minsk, one of Russia’s few allies in its war against Ukraine, praising President Alexander Lukashenko’s regime for running a “thriving country”.
He claimed that the authorities in Warsaw, under the influence of the United States and Great Britain, were “leading the country to war.”
His decision was denounced by the Warsaw authorities.
“Anyone who flees from Poland to Belarus to defame Poland and the NATO community we are a part of is a scoundrel and a traitor,” Stanisław Żaryn, an adviser to President Andrzej Duda, told reporters in Warsaw.
Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski said: “This is shocking information that I find difficult to comment on.”
Relations between Poland and Belarus are at their lowest level in decades. Warsaw has accused the Minsk regime of orchestrating a migration crisis along their shared border, supporting Russia’s war in Ukraine and violently crushing dissent after the 2020 presidential election.
Polish news site Onet reported in 2019 that Szmydt was part of an informal group that discussed how to discredit judges who did not swear allegiance to the former government of the nationalist Law and Justice party.
Szmydt’s defection to Belarus is not the first of its kind.
In December 2021, Polish soldier Emil Czeczko fled to Belarus and later appeared in Belarusian state media to criticize Poland’s handling of the migration crisis. Czeczko allegedly committed suicide in Minsk in March 2022.
