Reporter responds to Deputy Minister: the state has all the means of surveillance

Superwizjer journalists penetrated the Pride and Modernity organisation and revealed what goes on at Polish neo-Nazi gatherings.

Deputy Minister of Interior and Administration, Jarosław Zieliński, said at Wednesday’s session of the Sejm Committee on Administration that the journalists had an “obligation to inform law enforcement agencies at the time, in May, and not today. They should have informed the police, the Internal Security Agency and public prosecutor’s office back then,” he said.

The Deputy Minister said that the question of why the footage was only published now “remained open.”

“I would like to collectively respond to everyone who attacks Superwizjer, in fact defending the neo-Nazis: journalists inform the society and authorities through their publications,” commented Adam Pieczyński, TVN24’s editor-in-chief. “Any exceptions to this rule are laid down in Polish law,” he added.

Bertold Kittel, one of the authors of the feature, said on TVN24’s Wstajesz i wiesz that he was surprised by the Deputy Minister’s statement. “I interpreted Minister Zieliński’s words as an attempt at intimidating the authors of this footage,” he said, adding that “over the last two years, the state received enormous prerogatives with respect to surveillance of the society and intercepting online communications.”

“Nevertheless, neither the police, supervised by Deputy Minister Zieliński, nor the Internal Security Agency or any other service had any knowledge of what was going on in extremist circles. The ISA’s statutory duty is to monitor such matters,” said the Superwizjer journalist.

“The Polish state has tremendous surveillance and supervision powers. It has tools to conduct special operations,” he listed. “There were three of us, and we managed to do that without any special means or expenses. (...) I would have expected such groups to be monitored. We do what we do in order to describe the reality we live in. We did that because this is our role,” Kittel said.

Law and Justice senator Jan Żaryn also said in Tuesday’s Kropka nad i that the journalists should have informed the police earlier. He inquired why TVN did not notify the crime to the prosecutor’s office before broadcasting the feature. He suggested that the journalists should have filed a “civic denunciation” with the prosecutor’s office of the Internal Security Agency.

He accused them of waiting months from registering the antics on Hitler’s birthday to broadcasting the piece (he once said “almost a year” and in another fragment of the conversation “eight months” – editor’s note). The interviewer, Monika Olejnik, responded that the entire footage presented in the show also covered events that took place in November 2017.

Żaryn’s accusation was not incidental or expressed in the heat of emotions. Throughout his interview with Olejnik, the Law and Justice senator repeated it five times.

“Why did TVN decide to pursue the case in January rather than inform the prosecutor’s office or the ISA about an incident that clearly breached the law?” he asked.

With regard to the journalist who penetrated the neo-Nazi organisation, he said she “did not do what she should have, namely file a civic denunciation to the ISA or the prosecutor’s office. I am only criticising the fact that the prosecutor’s office only found out about it eight months later rather than on the very next day,” he reiterated in the further part of the interview. “Why didn’t TVN cut out this fragment and denounce the crime that took place in April or May 2017 rather than in January 2018?” he added.

Lawyers asked by tvn24.pl to comment on the matter made it clear that doubts expressed by Law and Justice politicians were legally unfounded. Cutting out a fragment of the collected footage prior to its publication – as the politician would have wanted – and sending it to the prosecutor’s office is not an obligation of either the journalist, the editorial board or the publisher.

“It’s obvious that a publication of journalistic material is tantamount to denouncing a crime and may constitute a premises to instigate proceedings ex officio. There is no such thing as a ‘civic denunciation’ obligation prior to publishing the material,” stressed Ireneusz Kamiński, Professor at the Jagiellonian University and supervisor of the “Observatory of Media Freedom” programme run by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

On 20 January TVN’s Superwizjer disclosed the results of a journalistic investigation concerning the activity of certain Polish nationalist circles, such as the “Pride and Modernity” Association.

Hidden camera recordings show, among others, celebrations of Adolf Hitler’s 128th birthday anniversary organised in 2017 in a forest near Wodzisław Śląski. The footage depicts flags with swastikas hung on trees and an ‘altar’ in honour of Hitler with his black and white image. The participants of the gathering may be seen too: dressed in Wehrmacht uniforms, raising toasts “to Adolf Hitler and Poland, our beloved homeland” and sharing a cake in the colours of the Third Reich flag.

Źródło: tvn24.pl/tłumaczenie Intertext.com.pl