He is just an ordinary judge, says Igor Tuleya: “A judge has to be objective and calm, he has to weigh things up, cannot stand for either side, he is independent.” Tuleya is calm when he says this.

He speaks slowly and clearly, weighing every word.

But because he believes that the independence of judges in Poland is in jeopardy, his neutrality is over.

Tuleya is one of the leaders of the judges' protest against the changes in the Polish judiciary being promoted by the right-wing ruling party PiS.

Reinhard Veser

Editor in politics.

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He has a lot of time for his agenda right now.

Because of a decision that was unfavorable for the PiS, he was suspended from work a year ago and his salaries were cut.

And then criminal proceedings were initiated against him.

The prosecution wants Tuleya to be forcibly brought before an interrogation.

The likelihood that this will happen is far greater than the hope that he will be able to return to his service while the current government is in power.

This case made Tuleya one of the most famous judges in Poland.

There is graffiti that shows his striking face with the heavy glasses.

His portrait is held up during demonstrations against the PiS government.

It happens again and again that people recognize him on the street and thank him for his attitude.

He is showered with insults and threats on the Internet for this.

Media loyal to the government revile him as a would-be martyr who pulls the reputation of the entire judiciary in the mud.

The Minister of Justice as a personal enemy

Tuleya has seen political storms before. He is a judge at the Warsaw District Court, where all criminal proceedings end up that have anything to do with parliament or the government. Over the past decade and a half he has had to deal with a number of cases in which politics played a large role. He made Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro his personal enemy long before Ziobro began to bring the Polish judiciary under the control of the government after the PiS election victory in autumn 2015.

At that time it was about arrests for alleged corruption, which Ziobro was responsible for during his time as Minister of Justice and Attorney General in personal union from 2005 to 2007. When the whole thing was going to be dealt with legally, Tuleya declared an arrest to be illegal in one case and found the actions of the security forces to be disproportionate in another case: They had filmed an arrest with cameras, scheduled nightly interrogations and threatened the accused. Tuleya found a doctor accused of bribery guilty, but stated that the investigators' tactics aroused associations with the "darkest years of Stalinism".

Still, Igor Tuleya insists: “I am absolutely apolitical.

My decisions as a judge only have to do with laws and facts and nothing to do with my personal views. ”As evidence, he can cite a whole series of judgments in favor of prominent PiS politicians.

For example in the case of the “declaration of loyalty” by PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński, which appeared in the archives of the former State Security.

In the seventies and eighties, Kaczyński was active in the opposition to the communist dictatorship.

If Tuleya had not come to the conclusion that it was a fake, Kaczyński would not be allowed to run for any public office.

"Muzzle Law"

Tuleya's personal story is itself “part of Polish hell,” as he puts it.

After his criticism of Ziobro's “Stalinist” methods, his supporters attacked Tuleya because of his parents: The father, who died young, was in the militia, the mother worked for the communist state security.

Such attacks are typical: The PiS justifies its actions in the judiciary with the need to eradicate the remains of the dictatorship.

"I graduated from high school in 1989, my parents' life choices are not identical to mine," says Tuleya.

"I was not in the State Security and not in the party." That his parents were brought into play hurt him, but "if it goes against the person, it shows that they have no factual arguments".