THIRTEENTH OF DECEMBER AFTER MANY YEARS

I demand the ‘rehabilitation’ of an internee under martial law.

Justice sometimes comes late, and not always in the form we would expect.

But it does come – sooner or slower.
After the 1989 breakthrough, the Republic faced the problem of compensating for the wrongs caused by the repressive apparatus of the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL). A solution was adopted, according to which anyone wronged by the PRL judiciary for opposition activities could demand that a conviction be overturned if the conviction was a manifestation of political repression, and then demand compensation and damages. The legislator has thus given primacy to property claims, forgetting perhaps that honourable rehabilitation is just as important for the repressed.

About 10 years ago I received a phone call from Canada. I was contacted by Jacek, who had lived on the other side of the Atlantic for a quarter of a century. Thirty years earlier, Jacek was a miner in one of the Silesian mines, an activist in the Solidarity Trade Union. He was also one of the leaders of the occupational strike that broke out there in protest against the imposition of martial law.

In December 1981, the client was detained by units pacifying the strike, interned and charged. He was sentenced by a military court, then disciplinarily dismissed from his job in the mining industry. For several years, he wandered from one workplace to the next, nowhere to be found. He remained under the “protection” of the Security Service, which followed in his footsteps. Being a blacklisted person, he had no prospects in the then Poland- he emigrated to Canada in 1986.

The client demanded that steps be pursued towards – as he put it – ‘rehabilitation’. As the military court case file showed, the conviction was solely for participation in the organisation of the strike. Strictly common crimes (use of violence) were not attributed to the client, and the sole basis for the conviction was a decree of the Council of State of the People’s Republic of Poland on martial law, which was not officially published on the day the act was committed. The conviction therefore concerned actions that did not constitute an offence at the time of his act. Criminal law cannot act retroactively (lex retro non agit) – prior to the publication in the Journal of Laws of an act providing for the punishability of a specific conduct. The official publication – which the communist courts did not want to see – had not yet occurred at the time of the act.

While there were ‘strong’ grounds for overturning a wrongful conviction, the issue of the resulting monetary claims was problematic. The examination of the economic consequences of the harassment suffered by the Client was also ambiguous: as a pensioner in Canada, having previously worked as a “handyman” in a local school, he drew a higher salary than if he had acquired the right to a mining pension in the People’s Republic of Poland. In strictly economic terms, therefore, the client not only did not lose, but even gained, from his forced emigration. I had at my disposal the last “payroll slips” of the Client’s wages as a miner, as well as a breakdown of wages he had been drawing in a number of places where he had attempted to “get a foothold” before emigrating. Nominally, the amounts were similar or even slightly higher. Here too, in financial terms, was there a change for the better”? The client mentioned that, being on the ‘blacklist’, he was undertaking any work at the time. As a holder of a ‘letter of negative reference’, he sought it throughout almost the whole of southern Poland, earning wages with a much lower purchasing power in relation to those received before his dismissal from the mine. In the conditions of “real socialism”, it was difficult to obtain reliable data on the inflation then prevailing, on the basis of which I could compare the strength of the zloty as of 1981 vs. as of 1986. I decided to reach for the only available official data of a continuous nature, the archival announcements of the President of the Statistics Poland (GUS) on the average salary. Accordingly, I established that the remuneration the client would draw in the mine in 1981 was in a certain relation (approx. 81%) to the average wage for that year, while the remuneration he received between 1982 and 1986 was between 50% and 40% of the then average wage. I have related the “loss” determined in this way to the relevant part of the current average monthly salary, as determined by the GUS. In a similar manner, I determined the contemporary economic value of court fees and additional penalties, the cost of which the client had already incurred during martial law. The court agreed that it was permissible to determine in this way the economic value of the loss that the Client as suffered as an “extremist”. The amount so determined was awarded to the Client (sure, in contemporary PLN) as compensation.

Nonetheless, the Court did much more than that: after the verdict was read out, the panel thanked the Client for his activity during the communist period, referring to themselves and contemporary judges – who can enjoy independence in a democratic state – as “debtors” to the Client, overwhelmed with emotions. I was pleased to witness this, all the more so because I myself, being able to practice my profession in a democratic state, am indebted to the Client and people like him.

Moved, the client declared that this was really the kind of honourable ‘rehabilitation’ he had in mind. He confessed that he felt uncomfortable being able to claim in its place only money that he had not counted on and did not expect when he became involved in the Solidarity movement. The client asked me to help him with the formalities of donating the money he had been awarded to the social cause of his choice. This is what I did.