Eurasia Press & News
Conservative forces in both Poland and Slovakia used the cover of the pandemic to try to push through stricter limits on abortion this week. They succeeded in Poland, but just failed in Slovakia.
The Polish Constitutional Tribunal on Thursday ruled that abortions in the case of a malformation of the foetus are unconstitutional. Given that Poland already has the strictest abortion laws in the EU and abortions in the case of abnormalities or serious illnesses of the foetus represent about 98 per cent of legal abortions conducted, experts say abortion has now been de facto outlawed.
“Today’s judgement puts the health and lives of women in Poland at great risk and violates Poland’s obligations under international human rights treaties to refrain from retrogressive measures that roll-back women’s rights to sexual and reproductive health care,” said Leah Hoctor, regional director for Europe at the Center for Reproductive Rights, in a statement. “Poland must act now to bring its law into line with other EU member states and legalize abortion on a woman’s request or broad social grounds, and guarantee women’s full and effective access to care in situations where women’s physical or mental health is at risk.”
The Constitutional Tribunal in Poland is widely thought to be controlled by the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), with Court President Julia Przylebska known to be a personal friend of PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski. The ruling today comes as a result of a request filed in 2019 by a group of parliamentarians from PiS and the far-right, who asked the Tribunal to rule on the constitutionality of the legality of abortion in cases when the foetus is very sick or disabled.
Thousands of people protested the decision of the Tribunal in front of its building in Warsaw on Thursday night, as well as in several other Polish cities. The protesters in Warsaw marched to the headquarters of PiS and, later on, to the home of PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, in a demonstration that lasted well into the night. The police used tear gas several times to disperse the peaceful protesters. The organisers called for another protest on Friday at 7pm “at the same location”, meaning Kaczynski’s address, which is likely to be bigger than Thursday’s despite the current pandemic restrictions.
Meanwhile, in Slovakia, a group of ultra-conservative MPs from the Christian Union, a faction of the ruling OLANO (Ordinary People and Independent Personalities) party, managed to push through a quiet, unannounced vote on Tuesday afternoon, out of the glare of media and public attention, even though all non-pandemic related proposals were supposed to be forwarded to a later date this month.
“For some people, it will always be the main point of their political program, no matter what problems we are facing,” the women’s rights NGO Aspekt said in a statement on Tuesday.
The legislative proposals sought to impose new delays on women’s access to abortion by extending the current 48-hour mandatory waiting period to 96 hours. They also sought to require the certification of two doctors, instead of one, in situations where an abortion is necessary for medical reasons.
Yet despite their best efforts and the strength of the conservative bloc in parliament, the proposal failed by one vote; out of the 117 MPs present, 58 voted for the legislation.
Jana Bitto Ciganikova, an MP from the liberal Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) party, a main opponent of the proposed legislation, said that women had defeated a return to medieval times on Tuesday. She was, however, disappointed that her additional proposal to legalise an “abortion pill” did not succeed, either. “In Slovakia, we are intentionally endangering the health of our women during legal and legal procedures by forcing doctors to do this in a way that has not been used in the developed world for decades – surgical anesthesia,” she wrote on Facebook. “During Covid, the risk is even higher.”
Women’s rights organisations welcomed the result in parliament, however narrow it was. “Speaking up is worth it!” wrote Freedom of Choice (Moznost Volby) after the vote.
Among those voting for the proposed legislation of Anna Zaborska, the main author of the conservative proposal, were a bunch of coalition conservative MPs, and the whole parliamentary club of People’s Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), the country’s largest neo-fascist party. Thanks to their leader, Marian Kotleba, being stuck in quarantine, they were one vote short.
“I am sorry that my colleagues did not support the most vulnerable people in this situation – pregnant women and children,” wrote Zaborska on Facebook after the vote. Despite polls showing that most Slovaks don’t see abortions as a pressing issue, and the COVID-19 pandemic getting worse by the day, Zaborska said she won’t give up. “In six months, we will file our proposal again,” she promised.
Mass testing and other measures
As countries across the region struggle to contain the second wave of the pandemic, Slovakia announced some radical new measures, including the possible mass testing of the whole population.
Last Saturday, Slovak Prime Minister Igor Matovic said the country is preparing for the “biggest logistical operation in its history”. The mass testing, he said, had been discussed by the experts and the government for weeks, and seemed like the best idea to prevent a catastrophe occurring in this small country.
Although the breakthrough idea garnered support from all the coalition partners, as well as the leading medical experts on the crisis staff, it received a lot of criticism from the opposition, non-parliamentary parties and outside medical and legal experts.
While Matovic proposed that the testing would be voluntary, those who refused to get tested would have to stay in quarantine for 10 days, which multiple lawyers have argued might be unconstitutional. So, worryingly, did President Zuzana Caputova. “Voluntary under the threat of sanctions is not really voluntary,” she said in a statement on Tuesday.
Caputova called a meeting of the state’s Security Council on Tuesday, asking the leaders to deal with several issues: making sure the proposed quarantine would be constitutional, ensuring enough medical staff at hospitals to care for all patients, and guaranteeing the testing sites would be safe for people.
The pilot phase of mass testing should be carried out this weekend in four of the worst-hit districts in Northern Slovakia – Namestovo, Dolny Kubin, Tvrdosin and Bardejov. Then general national testing would continue over the two subsequent weekends – October 30 to November 1 and November 6-8.
After the surge of criticism over the legality and preparedness of such an operation, the reliability of the so-called “antigen” tests, and the safety of the test sites, the prime minister appeared to back-track on Wednesday.
“We are moving like a train with broken brakes,” said the premier on Wednesday, when Slovakia announced another record number of new daily cases (2,202) and a day after the first doctor in the country died of COVID-19. As such, Slovakia needs to pull the emergency break – and soon, he said, adding that testing itself might not be enough anymore. If the plans for mass testing don’t work out, the PM said, Slovakia would have to go into lockdown for at least three weeks.
“There will be a combination: a milder lockdown and then the mass testing,” said Jaroslav Nad, the defence minister, on Thursday morning.
With the pandemic continuing to surge, the Czech government was forced on Wednesday to announce additional measures, pushing the country even closer to a full lockdown – a state of affairs that Prime Minister Andrej Babis has been trying to avoid with increasing desperation for many weeks. Health Minister Roman Prymula lamented that given the march of the virus, models left the government with “no choice” but to impose the new restrictions.
Starting on Thursday and running to November 3, all retail outlets save basic shops and services will be closed and non-essential movement restricted. Babis explained that the measures are needed to avert the potential collapse of the healthcare system. Officials are worried that capacity will be sorely tested in early November, despite the government having secured help from Germany and the US.
The Czech Republic is now the world’s COVID-19 black spot. The country recorded a staggering 14,968 new cases on Wednesday, leaving it with over 975 infections per 100,000 population. The Czech public has largely resisted basic recommendations such as masks and social distancing during the second wave, and apparently is still struggling to take the threat seriously. Road systems around major shopping centres in Prague reportedly seized up on Wednesday evening as people rushed out for a last dose of retail therapy ahead of the store shutdown.
Babis, when he does appear in public, continues to complain that his critics have forgotten just how well he dealt with the first wave of pandemic in the spring. However, his boast in the summer that his country was “best in Covid!” doesn’t cut much ice anymore as the chaos mounts. Political polls show support for his Ano party continues to dwindle to new lows.
Whether that’s because people want his government to do more or less is hard to tell though. On Sunday, a protest on Prague’s Old Town Square against restrictions put in place earlier this month, including the closure of schools, pubs and sports events, turned ugly. Riot police used tear gas, flash grenades and water cannon to battle a crowd of around 500, as football and hockey hooligans hurled fireworks, bottles and paving stones. Fourteen people face criminal charges; eight police were injured.
Prymula, whom far-right groups in the crowd demanded should be sent “to the gas chambers”, warned that the protest could prove to be a super-spreader event that, ironically, would end up extending the restrictions. The participants were harshly criticised by officials for showing contempt for police and healthcare workers.
The Polish government also rolled out new measures as the number of new cases, hospitalisations and deaths from COVID continue to rise, and with doctors across the country reporting for more than a week now that they have run out of beds for serious patients.
The National Stadium in Warsaw and similar locations across Poland are being turned into ‘field hospitals’ to relieve pressure on the overwhelmed hospitals – although there are still doubts over how medical staff, already insufficient, will be found to work in these new locations.
Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on Wednesday that secondary schools will move into hybrid or distant learning, meaning only kids up to the age of 10 will continue to go to class normally in Poland as of next week. The PM insisted Poland was occupying the “middle ground”, meaning it was not going into full lockdown, but was nevertheless taking restrictive measures to limit the rise in infection numbers. He said the Polish economy would come out of this crisis in a strong position in the EU, and continued to suggest the country was faring much better in countering the pandemic than many Western European countries – a topic Morawiecki returns to time and again during his public interventions.
Covid cases are also hitting record highs in Hungary, with a government minister being quarantined and one government commissioner in hospital, in grave condition, but there is little sign that the government intends to follow in the footsteps of the Czechs or Slovaks and impose any further restrictions. Instead, Hungary is concentrating its firing power on Brussels.
The European Commission’s rule of law report, published on September 30, has seemingly hit a nerve in the Hungarian government. The critical news site Népszava has revealed the government responded to the European Commission in a three-page document that made some remarkable allegations. It not only accused the sources used in compiling the report of being one-sided – out of 13 NGOs, 11 were directly or indirectly linked to the network of philanthropist George Soros – and that the rule of law is only a vaguely defined term, but it struck back, claiming that Denmark and Sweden both have serious problems in fighting money laundering and that the Finnish media landscape is not particularly pluralistic either.
Previously, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said in one of his regular Friday morning radio interviews that in German speaking countries, corruption is much more widespread than in Hungary. The US-funded Radio Free Europe reminded its readers that according to global corruption indices, German speaking countries like Switzerland (6) Germany (12) and Austria (16) are among the best performers, while Hungary currently lies in 73rd spot on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, on a par with Romania.
The latest attacks open a new chapter in Hungarian foreign policy. Now, instead of targeting Brussels bureaucrats, the Fidesz government is now ragging on fellow EU members. And, perhaps not coincidentally, those who have been the most vocal in criticising Hungary lately.
Orban for Trump
Speculation is running high in Hungary about the possible consequences of the US presidential election to US relations. Since the latest polls show a considerable lead for Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate, many wonder how a possible change of guard at the White House might affect Orban’s government, which is on particularly friendly terms with Donald Trump. Not even the expulsion of the George Soros-funded Central European University (CEU) soured the relationship. Biden, however, has already given a taste of what he thinks about Orban, when he compared Hungary to Belarus in a recent interview.
Orban seems relaxed, though, telling Reuters in an interview that he is convinced Trump will win the election. In the case of a Biden victory, Orban anticipated that the level of openness, kindness and helping each other would be lower than before. The government-loyal Magyar Nemzet appears unconcerned too, a recent headline reading: “Everything speaks to a Trump success”. That actually is a quote from a US analyst who puts a Trump victory at 91%. The daily, which is not usually concerned with foreign affairs, is now also busy reporting daily about the alleged corrupt affairs of Biden’s son, Hunter.
Pope in favour of LGBT civil unions
Pope Francis’s endorsement of civil unions for LGBT couples this week sparked strong reactions in Poland – a very Catholic country, where LGBT rights have been at the forefront of political life for almost two years now as the governing PiS party routinely scapegoats the community for electoral gain.
“Homosexual people have the right to be in a family. They are the children of God,” the Pope said in an interview for a documentary about him which premiered on Wednesday at the Rome Film Festival. “What we have to have is a civil union law, that way they are legally covered.”
LGBT people in Poland received the statement with joy, calling on the Polish Catholic Church to follow the line set by the head of the church. Progressive politicians have also called on the Polish governing party to put an end to its demonising of LGBT people, now that the Pope has sent such a strong signal.
“Will the Pope himself now end up on the list of enemies of the right?” commented parliamentarian Krzystof Smiszek, from the left-wing alliance Lewica, who is himself in an openly gay relation. Smiszek then called on the Polish episcopate to follow the example set from above.
Right-wing commentators have responded by saying that it is strange the Pope would change the position of the Catholic Church on such a key issue via a statement in a film.
New Polish education minister promises textbook changes
PiS politician Przemyslaw Czarnek was appointed education minister this week, despite protests from students and widespread criticism over his previous homophobic remarks. As Czarnek came to work on Wednesday, he was greeted by a banner hanging from the ministry building that said: “Boycott Czarnek. Homophobe. Xenophobe. Fundamentalist.”
Critics of Czarnek have reasons to worry. In his first interview since being appointed, Czarnek told the daily Nasz Dziennik that, “there is no doubt of the domination or even dictatorship of the left-liberal views, especially those radical in content, even totalitarian, which have taken over particularly higher education, but have also penetrated secondary and primary schools”.
He promised his ministry would offer to support the “freeing” of humanities studies from “political correctness” and “left-liberal ideology”. He also said he would prioritise a review of textbooks, especially in history, social sciences and the Polish language, as they were “too broad”.
Poland inks nuclear deal with US
This week the Polish and US governments signed a deal over the development of a nuclear program in Poland, which is likely to involve the country buying 18 billion dollars’ worth of nuclear technology from US companies, according to a statement from the US Energy Department.
Preparatory work for the nuclear program, which is said to involve the building of six reactors, is set to take place over the next year and a half. The deal was signalled by US President Donald Trump during the visit of Polish President Andrzej Duda to the While House in June, in the last days of his campaign for re-election.
The Polish government sees nuclear as a key component of its energy strategy that is centred on moving away from the country’s dependency on Russian gas and reducing its coal consumption as mandated by the EU. Public debate over nuclear, however, has been limited in Poland.
Offside in Czechia
The COVID-19 onslaught is probably something of a relief for Czechia’s footballing authorities. The pandemic’s domination of the news cycle has taken the spotlight off the corruption scandal currently shaking the game from top to bottom. On Monday, Roman Berbr – long a malign and powerful influence over the Czech game, according to insiders – announced that he will resign as deputy chairman of the Football Association of the Czech Republic (FACR). Days earlier Berbr and 19 others were detained by police during a raid on the FACR headquarters in Prague in connection with a match-fixing scam centred on the lower leagues. Berbr, a former referee who over the past two decades has survived numerous accusations of corruption, is also suspected of embezzling money from Pilsen’s regional FA, from which he has also resigned. The head of the FACR’s referees committee, Berbr’s long-term partner Dagmar Damkova, is also rumoured to have quit.
Giving to those not in need
The Czech government plans to hand EU money intended to ease the impact of the energy transition on vulnerable communities to large state-owned energy giants and gas and coal oligarchs, a leaked government document lays out. According to the Seznam Zpravy news site, the document shows that the planned beneficiaries from the Czech allocation of 3.4 billion euros from Brussels’ Just Transition Fund (JTF) include state-owned energy group CEZ and oil major Unipetrol, which is controlled by the Polish state. Billionaire Daniel Kretinsky’s EPH, which specialises in highly polluting coal projects as well as gas, is also on the list alongside Lovochemie, a chemical plant owned by Prime Minister Babis. The 40-billion-euro JTF is meant to be used to help communities centred on coal mining cope with the phasing out of coal during the transformation to a more environmentally friendly economy. EU documents suggest the cash should be used to support small and medium-sized companies for research, environmental restoration projects, and educational programs and retraining.
Another top Slovak official in cuffs
On Thursday morning, Slovak media reported that the head of the Special Prosecutor’s Office, Dusan Kovacik, had been detained by the National Criminal Agency (NAKA). According to Dennik N, his detention is possibly connected to the testimony of another top official, Ludovit Mako, a former director of the criminal office of the financial authority, who has been in custody since September.
Kovacik, a much-criticised special prosecutor responsible for overseeing the most serious criminal cases in the country, including corruption and organised crime, is a close ally of former prime minister Robert Fico. During the anti-government protests after the murder of journalist Jan Kuciak in 2018, people called for Kovacik to step down because of a lack of trust that his office would support an effective investigation. He remained in his post, however, and his mandate should end in 2021.
According to Dennik N, Kovacik is suspected of helping a well-known organised crime group “takacovci”. The police have refused to offer more information about the case, which is still under investigation.
