Polish prosecutors drop case against former President Wałęsa — Notes from Poland
The District Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw, Poland, has discontinued criminal proceedings against former President Lech Wałęsa, who was accused of giving false testimony regarding documents about his alleged cooperation with communist security services. As Notes from Poland reports, prosecutors found no grounds to hold Wałęsa liable.
Origins of the case
The proceedings were linked to testimony Wałęsa gave in 2016 during an investigation by the Institute of National Remembrance. The investigation began after documents bearing signatures that, according to the materials, belonged to Wałęsa were discovered in the home archive of Czesław Kiszczak, communist Poland’s former interior minister.
The documents referred to an alleged commitment to cooperate with the Security Service under the pseudonym TW Bolek; they also included receipts for payments and agent reports. Wałęsa consistently denied claims that he had cooperated with communist security bodies in the 1970s and called the documents forgeries.
During questioning at the Institute of National Remembrance, he denied writing or signing all but one of the documents. In 2021, Wałęsa was charged with giving false testimony, and in 2023 the case was referred to court. In 2024, the court granted prosecutors’ motion and returned the case to them.
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Prosecutors’ position
In its decision to discontinue the case, the prosecutor’s office cited significant methodological errors in the previous comparison of handwriting and determination of the authorship of handwritten texts. According to the office, there was no evidence confirming with 100% certainty that the samples used for comparison had indeed belonged to Wałęsa.
Prosecutors also referred to testimony stating that in the 1970s Wałęsa did not write extensive handwritten texts and could barely read and write. In the prosecutor’s office’s view, the case materials provide no certain grounds for considering him the author of documents from the so-called Kiszczak files and, therefore, for proving that he lied during questioning. The office also noted that even if Wałęsa had given false testimony, he could have been protected by the constitutional right not to testify against himself.
Poland’s justice minister and prosecutor general, Waldemar Żurek, welcomed the closure of the case, stating that under the rule of the Law and Justice party, the state apparatus persecuted the leader of Solidarity while ignoring the facts. Historian Sławomir Cenckiewicz, who researched Wałęsa’s alleged cooperation with security services, criticized the prosecutor’s decision.
