WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland has annulled the diplomatic passport of an ex-justice minister accused of abuse of power, the foreign minister said on Tuesday, as Warsaw tries to enforce a warrant for his arrest. Zbigniew Ziobro, who is wanted by prosecutors on 26 charges including heading an organised criminal group, is currently in Hungary and may […]
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Poland annuls passport of ex-justice minister wanted by prosecutors
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WARSAW (Reuters) -Poland has annulled the diplomatic passport of an ex-justice minister accused of abuse of power, the foreign minister said on Tuesday, as Warsaw tries to enforce a warrant for his arrest.
Zbigniew Ziobro, who is wanted by prosecutors on 26 charges including heading an organised criminal group, is currently in Hungary and may follow the example of one of his deputies, Marcin Romanowski, in asking for political asylum there.
Romanowski has also had his diplomatic and private passports cancelled in order to stop him travelling outside the European Union’s open-border Schengen zone, Rzeczpospolita daily reported on Saturday.
“At the request of the National Prosecutor’s Office, I annulled the diplomatic passport of Zbigniew Z.,” Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski wrote on X.
It was not immediately clear if Ziobro still had access to his regular passport.
Ziobro is accused of misuse of money from the Justice Fund, designed to help victims of crime, including for the purchase of the sophisticated Pegasus spyware system, which was allegedly used against domestic political opponents.
The former minister says the allegations against him are part of a witch hunt orchestrated by the government in revenge for actions he took against suspected corruption among people close to Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
He had offered via his lawyer to be questioned in either Hungary or Belgium, where his wife works and where he had been undergoing treatment for cancer.
However, current Justice Minister Waldemar Zurek said it was not for Ziobro to dictate to prosecutors where he could be questioned, and that if he did not come back to Poland he would become subject to a European Arrest Warrant.
Poland has already issued a European Arrest Warrant for Romanowski but has been unable to force his return due to Hungary’s decision to grant him asylum.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a nationalist who had close ties to Poland’s former Law and Justice (PiS) administration, met Ziobro last month in Budapest and accused the current Tusk government of launching a “political witch hunt” against Ziobro.
(Reporting by Alan Charlish; Editing by Aidan Lewis)