President Andrzej Duda
Credit: AP Photo/Petr David Josek, File
An award-winning Polish author and screen-writer faces up to three years behind bars for calling the Polish president a “moron”.
Jakub Zulczyk fell foul of a Polish law prohibiting the “public insult of the president of the republic of Poland” when he mocked Andrzej Duda over a tweet he posted congratulating Joseph Biden on his victory in last year’s US presidential election.
Mr Zulczyk, who has studied US politics, expressed his surprise that the president had written that “we await the nomination by the Electoral College”.
“I have never heard that in the American election process there is such a thing as a ‘nomination by the Electoral College’. Biden won the election,” wrote Mr Zulczyk. “Andrzej Duda is a moron."
Aleksandra Skrzyniarz, a spokeswoman for the Warsaw prosecutor’s office said: “The accused was charged with publicly insulting the Polish president by using a term commonly considered offensive on a social network profile."
She added that the accused “had not confessed to committing the alleged offense, but had indicated that his statement was a critical assessment of the president’s actions."
Mr Zulczyk, who is well known in Poland for his writing and his television work, is not the first person to be prosecuted for insulting the Polish head of state.
The crime, just one of a number prohibiting the insult of “constitutional organs of the state” in Poland, has been on the statute books for decades although it is rarely enforced.
His prosecution comes at a time of heightened sensitivities in Poland. The government, led by the social conservative Law and Justice party, faces frequent accusations of attempting to politicise the criminal-justice system — something it strenuously denies — since it came into power in 2015.
If convicted of insulting Mr Duda, the 37-year-old writer could be sentenced to three years in prison or be fined, or sentenced to a term of community service.
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