In 2011, the burnt body of Jolanta Brzeska, a prominent tenants’ rights activist who was fighting evictions from her own building, was found dead in woodland on the outskirts of Warsaw, exacerbating suspicions about the involvement of organised crime in the reprivatisation business. Fellow activists who knew Brzeska, who has become an icon of the tenants’ rights movement, are scornful of the official verdict of suicide, noting that she had been investigating the criminal associations of certain developers, and that it was highly unlikely that she had decided to go to the woods and set herself on fire.
Many blame the country’s judiciary for the abuses and injustices associated with wild reprivatisation. “In the absence of legislation passed by parliament, it was the judiciary who shaped the legal framework for reprivatisation,” says Tomasz Luterek, an academic and specialist in the reprivatisation issue. “Whether out of corruption, laziness, lack of knowledge or unprofessionalism, they carry a lot of responsibility for what has happened.”
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) has seized upon the issue as part of its campaign to take control of the appointments of Polish judges, setting up a verification commission that is examining irregularities in the reprivatisation process, and which has been given the power to overturn legal decisions.
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- 'They stole the soul of the city': how Warsaw's reprivatisation is causing chaos, Monday, December 18, 2017 - 07:00