Zbigniew Ziobro spent eight years reshaping Poland’s legal system. Now, speaking from political asylum in Hungary, the former justice minister says the same system is being turned against him, and that he can only fight it from abroad. Ziobro, once one of the most powerful figures in Polish politics, ran the justice system under the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) government from 2015 to 2023. He is now under investigation over the alleged misuse of public funds and the deployment of Pegasus spyware against political opponents — cases pursued by prosecutors under Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centrist government. “My presence here isn’t an escape of any kind — it’s a form of fighting back,” Ziobro told POLITICO by telephone from Budapest, after Viktor Orbán’s government granted him asylum earlier this month. “Because here I can fight. There, I’d be stripped of any ability to do so.” Prosecutors say investigations linked to Ziobro are part of an effort to unwind decisions taken during his tenure, when sweeping judicial reforms gave ministers broad influence over prosecutors and disciplinary control over judges. Those changes put Poland on a prolonged collision course with Brussels and were later condemned by EU courts. Ziobro rejected those allegations and cast himself as a victim of political revenge. “I wanted to reform Poland’s judiciary — and that was never accepted, including by the EU,” he said. “They had the right to criticize me politically. They did not have the right to falsely accuse me of theft.” He accused prosecutors of using pre-trial detention as a political weapon against figures linked to his former ministry. As an example, Ziobro pointed to the case of two of his former aides and that of Michał Olszewski, a Catholic priest accused of misusing funds from a justice ministry program for crime victims. Olszewski spent months in pre-trial detention, and Poland’s ombudsman later cited instances of improper treatment. Hungary’s decision to grant Ziobro asylum has pushed the dispute beyond Poland’s borders, infuriating Warsaw and raising questions about the EU’s ability to enforce cooperation between member states. Poland’s justice minister, Waldemar Żurek, called the move a “dangerous precedent,” warning it could allow governments to shield political allies from accountability at home. From exile, Ziobro has broadened his attack. He accused the European Commission and its president, Ursula von der Leyen, of hypocrisy for condemning alleged rule-of-law abuses under PiS while tolerating what he called “lawlessness” under the current government in Warsaw. Polish officials reject that. Deputy Foreign Minister Ignacy Niemczycki on Monday pointed to assessments by international organizations showing that rule-of-law standards deteriorated under PiS and have improved since the change of government. “Given Poland’s political situation, not everything we would like to do is possible,” Niemczycki said, responding to a question from POLITICO in Brussels. “But what happens in practice matters far more. And speaking frankly, if Ziobro has fled to Hungary, then what exactly are we debating?” A DIVIDED RECEPTION AT HOME Ziobro’s safe haven in Budapest may not last. Hungary is heading toward a parliamentary election in April, with pro-EU opposition challenger Péter Magyar leading in polls. Asked whether a change of government could jeopardize his asylum status, Ziobro brushed off the question and instead mounted a vigorous defense of Orbán. “Hungarians will choose Orbán,” Ziobro said. “They know that in an unstable world, experience and the ability to protect the country’s security matter.” He rejected claims that Orbán’s ties to Russia reflected an ideological sympathy. Instead, Ziobro argued that Hungary’s reliance on Russian gas left it little room to maneuver. Back in Poland, Ziobro’s asylum has divided opinion. Polls suggest a majority of PiS voters see Ziobro’s stay in Hungary as a liability for the party. President Karol Nawrocki, a PiS ally, has offered only a cautious backing, warning that not everyone in Poland can count on a fair trial. Pro-PiS broadcaster Telewizja Republika has amplified Ziobro’s narrative of a witch-hunt, producing near-constant television coverage on police searches, detentions and court proceedings involving the former minister’s allies. From Budapest, Ziobro said he is writing a book about what he called “Europe’s hypocrisy and Tusk’s dictatorship,” as Polish tabloids chronicle his new life strolling about the Hungarian capital. He insisted his exile is temporary and said he plans to return to Polish politics, staging a comeback ahead of the 2027 parliamentary election. “I am convinced Tusk’s government will fall,” he said. “It will end in failure and he will have to answer for what he has done.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is exposing a dangerous weak link in EU law that allows populist governments to shield their allies from jail, Poland’s Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek warned in an interview with POLITICO. Żurek’s concerns focus on the Hungarian government’s decision last month to grant asylum to Zbigniew Ziobro, a justice minister in Warsaw’s former nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) administration. Budapest’s foreign ministry argued that criminal investigations against Ziobro in Poland — into alleged misuse of public funds and deployment of Pegasus spyware against political opponents — amount to political persecution. Żurek, from the liberal, pro-EU government of Donald Tusk, retorted this use of political asylum now poses a massive challenge to the EU’s ability to enforce rule of law. If Hungary’s approach goes unanswered, he warned, others will bypass the courts across the 27-country bloc to protect their political allies. “This is a dangerous precedent for the entire European Union,” Żurek said. “If the EU accepts this, everyone will start citing it … justice will become a political tool.” “An asylum decision is a political decision — not a ruling by an independent court,” he added. “That is what is most worrying, because it circumvents the rules of the European arrest warrant.” Ziobro fled to Hungary after losing parliamentary immunity in November. A Polish court is expected to decide in February whether to order Ziobro’s arrest. Under normal EU practice, such a ruling would trigger swift extradition. But in Orbán’s Hungary, there is a high risk it will hit a dead end. A LOOPHOLE ALREADY IN USE This is not Poland’s first run-in with this loophole. Ziobro’s case follows that of his former deputy, Marcin Romanowski, who was granted asylum by Hungary in 2024 and remains there despite a valid arrest warrant. EU institutions have so far failed to take any step to force Budapest to hand him over. The case exposes a structural flaw in the EU’s justice system, which depends on mutual trust between member states to enforce each other’s court decisions. That reliance means European arrest warrants work only if governments choose to enforce them. And when one refuses, the EU has no clear, effective way to make it comply. At the end of December, Budapest hard-wired that loophole into law by barring courts from applying European arrest warrants once asylum has been granted. Żurek claims that populist governments such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, pictured, are using an EU legal loophole to protect political allies. | Janos Kummer/Getty Images Hungarian officials have defended the decision as necessary to protect Polish politicians from what they describe as political persecution. Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó said Hungary had granted asylum to Polish citizens because “democracy and the rule of law are in crisis” in Poland. Ziobro himself embraced that suggestion. In a statement published from Budapest, he said he had accepted asylum because he was resisting “political banditry” and a “creeping dictatorship” in Poland under Prime Minister Tusk. He thanked Orbán for what he called Hungary’s “courageous leadership” and said he would remain abroad until “genuine guarantees of the rule of law” are restored. Żurek said it matters who is exploiting the loophole. Orbán, he said, is Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “closest ally inside the European Union” and a leader prepared to show how far EU law can be pushed without consequence. He said the European Commission should take Hungary to the Court of Justice of the EU, the bloc’s highest court. Only a binding ruling, he added, could stop governments from using asylum as a shield against criminal accountability. The Commission has yet to act. Spokesperson Markus Lammert said last week that EU law presumes all member countries are safe from political persecution, meaning EU citizens should not need asylum elsewhere in the bloc. Poland, he added, does not meet the threshold for an exception to that rule. THE DANGER OF WAITING IT OUT The timing is sensitive as Hungary heads toward an April election. Opposition leader Péter Magyar, a former Orbán ally turned critic, has campaigned on a pledge to ease tensions with Brussels. But Żurek said Poland’s own experience shows why betting on political change would be a mistake for EU institutions. Years of rule-of-law clashes under PiS left damage that has proved hard to undo even after Tusk returned to power in 2023. Despite the change in government, Poland remains locked in an institutional conflict with President Karol Nawrocki, a nationalist ally of PiS whose veto powers have blocked key reforms. Earlier this month, Nawrocki vetoed legislation implementing the EU’s Digital Services Act, attacking the law using rhetoric echoing U.S. President Donald Trump’s criticism of the tech regulation as censorship. “If EU structures react too slowly, this disease can become fatal for democracy,” Żurek said. Zbigniew Ziobro, a former justice minister in Warsaw who is facing a criminal investigation in Poland, was granted asylum in Hungary. | Art Service/EPA From France’s Marine Le Pen and Austria’s Herbert Kickl to the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, hardline European politicians have long portrayed legal accountability as political persecution. Today this framing also lifts heavily from Trump’s playbook, Żurek said, recasting courts, prosecutors and regulators as partisan enemies to make defying judicial decisions politically acceptable. “These politicians present themselves as conservatives,” he said. “In reality, they are populists and nationalists — and that is extremely dangerous for Europe.” The consequences are already visible inside Poland’s justice system. “I hear prosecutors say in private: ‘I can bring charges today — and become a target of revenge in a few years,’” Żurek said. “Even final convictions can be wiped out by presidential pardons. That sense of futility is deeply destructive. People are simply afraid.”

WARSAW — Polish lawmakers voted to strip former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro of his parliamentary immunity and green-lighted his arrest Friday evening, marking an escalation of the political power struggle between the coalition government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk and the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party. Tusk made holding PiS to account for alleged corruption one of his headline promises in the campaign ahead of the 2023 general election, which his coalition won, ending eight years of PiS rule. Ziobro — who was justice minister in two PiS administrations — is a key figure in a probe seeking to find out why and how the PiS government allegedly purchased Pegasus spyware to spy on political opponents. The spyware purchase is part of a wider scandal, the Tusk government claims, involving alleged misuse of the so-called Justice Fund — a special pool of money under the justice minister’s control that was set up to help crime victims. Prosecutors accuse Ziobro specifically of leading an “organized crime group” in the Justice Ministry that embezzled some 150 million złoty (€35 million) from the Justice Fund. Other charges include lack of oversight and mishandling of documents. If indicted, Ziobro could face up to 25 years in prison. The parliamentary action on Friday was actually a series of 27 separate votes — one vote on each of the 26 charges levied against Ziobro by the prosecutors, plus a final vote on detention and arrest. The final vote was 244-198 against Ziobro, with no abstentions. A final decision to arrest Ziobro lies with the court. “Let the law always mean law, and justice — justice,” Tusk said on social media after the votes, referring to the name of the opposition party. Ziobro, who has been in Budapest since late October, denies all the charges. The former minister accused Tusk of acting to preempt corruption charges against himself. Tusk “knows that we were conducting, under my supervision, investigations into suspected corruption in which he may have been involved,” Ziobro told broadcaster TV Republika after the parliament’s action. PiS has stood firmly behind its former minister, attacking the government for exacting political revenge on the minister and accusing the administration of a lack of ethics in going after Ziobro, who has been undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer. “The prosecution has been taken over by force and has been operating illegally since. I believe it may take some time, but all those involved will face justice — and today’s developments will certainly increase their sentences,” PiS Chairman Jarosław Kaczyński told reporters in the parliament, according to Onet. Ziobro has been observing the events in Budapest, where he has found a safe haven alongside another former Justice Ministry official, Marcin Romanowski, who was granted political asylum by the administration of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Ziobro also met with Orban last week. Ahead of the vote, Ziobro hinted he would not apply for asylum and plans to return to Poland. “Since this issue came up while I’m here, I decided to stay a bit longer, but I won’t extend my visit indefinitely. I will inform you of my next decisions in due course,” Ziobro said.

BERLIN — One of Hungary’s most outspoken critics in Brussels has filed a criminal complaint against Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán following a failed attempt to hack his email account using spyware in the run-up to the European Parliament elections. German Green MEP Daniel Freund and German NGO the Society for Civil Rights named “Viktor Orbán and unknown” in the complaint, which was seen by POLITICO, and requested that the state prosecutor in the western German city of Krefeld and cyber crime authorities launch an investigation. “There are indications that the Hungarian secret service is behind the attack,” Freund and the NGO said in a joint statement on Wednesday. The complaint gives details about an email that someone claiming to be a Ukrainian student sent to Freund’s parliamentary email address at the end of May 2024. The message asked the MEP to write a short message in which he would share his “beliefs concerning the accession of Ukraine to the European Union,” as well as a link. Freund did not click on the link. The complaint said that Parliament warned Freund that the link contained spyware likely made by the Israeli company Candiru, which was blacklisted by the U.S. government in 2021 for human rights violations. “According to the EU Parliament’s IT experts, the Hungarian government could be behind the eavesdropping on me,” Freund said in a statement. “This comes as no surprise: Orbán despises democracy and the rule of law. If the suspicion is confirmed, it would be an outrageous attack on the European Parliament.” Freund and the NGO asked prosecutors to open an investigation to clarify “the facts of the case” through investigative measures including the questioning of witnesses and conducting an independent forensic analysis. The Hungarian government had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication. If a device is infected with spyware, attackers can access all stored data and communications. They can also activate the camera and microphone to listen in on conversations. Freund has been one of the key players to have successfully advocated for EU funds for Hungary to be frozen. He also led a push to suspend Hungary’s presidency of the Council of the EU last year.