The Mayor of Warsaw Rafał Trzaskowski has banned the display of religious symbols, which in practice in Poland means mainly Christian crosses, from the city hall and other public buildings making the capital the first city in Poland to take such action (Brussels Signal, Polskie Radio, Notes from Poland).
Under the new rules announced on May 16th, crosses may not be hung on walls – a practice that has traditionally been common in Poland – and staff must avoid displaying religious symbols on their desks. It has also been decreed that all officials events will now be secular in nature and therefore not include any kind of prayer.
Trzaskowski, who was re-elected for a second term as mayor last month, is a deputy leader of the centrist Civic Platform (PO) party that forms the main part of Poland’s socially ‘progressive’, Europhile ruling coalition. In 2021, PO leader – and now prime minister – Donald Tusk called for the removal of crosses from public buildings.
The issue of the presence of crosses in public buildings is highly sensitive in Poland, not least because under the communist regime of the Polish People’s Republic, which had a policy of planned atheisation, all Christian symbols were removed from public buildings and spaces.
After that regime collapsed in 1989, crosses appeared once more on and in public buildings, including the parliamentary chamber. The Polish State also signed an agreement with the Vatican that gave the Church a number of rights, including the right to promote catechism in Polish schools – although even here there is now growing controversy, with education minister Barbara Nowacka recently having announced that as part of the Civic Coalition’s planned atheisation attempts to make Poland a more secular state, the number of hours that Catholic catechism classes are taught in schools will be halved.
The removal of crosses from public buildings has been criticised by the opposition, right-wing PiS party, with its leader Jarosław Kaczyński devoting a part of his latest European Parliament elections campaign speech to the issue, accusing the Warsaw Mayor of “triggering a religious war”.
Kaczyński linked the issue to the European elections by arguing that Prime Minister Tusk’s party represented “a European option to destroy religion and faith”.
In response, Mayor Trzaskowski has stressed that, with his new policy, he is merely trying to combat discrimination rather than target religion. “Poland is a secular state and Warsaw is its capital,” he said. “No one is challenging people’s rights to their religious beliefs but anyone who comes into a public office should feel they are in a neutral place.”
However, Polish citizens who hold gender critical beliefs – i.e., that sex is biological and cannot be changed – might feel that Mayor Trzaskowski’s version of ‘neutrality’ comes with more than a hint of bias.
Alongside cracking down on religious freedom of expression, the Mayor has also moved to strengthen LGBTQ rights in the city, with officials now required to respect the choice of pronouns favoured by someone they are dealing with.
Those rules relate to city employees including teachers. “In the case of a transgender person whose appearance may differ from stereotypical ideas related to gender recorded in official documents, address him or her with the name or gender pronouns that he or she indicates,” the regulations state. They also specify that “a non-binary person should be asked for their preferred pronouns”.
News of Warsaw’s crackdown on religious freedom and the freedom of speech of Polish citizens with gender critical beliefs comes just a few months after the Polish Ministry of Justice published a draft amendment to the penal code regarding hate speech on the website of the Government Legislation Centre. Echoing draconian hate speech legislation recently introduced in Scotland, the proposal widens the catalogue of discriminatory criteria to include disability, age, sexual orientation and gender identification.
According to Polish media site DoRzeczy, the proposals have been brought forward by Deputy Minister of Justice Krzysztof Śmiszek, from the New Left Party, which is part of the centrist pro-European Civic Coalition Government alongside Prime Minister Tusk’s Civic Platform and the Third Way alliance.
If it becomes law, the amendment will include penalties of between three months to five years in prison for acts of violence or the threat of the use of force based on discrimination. Other penalties include up to three years in prison for ‘defamation’ based on discrimination against sexual orientation or gender identification.
Inclusion of ‘gender identification’ as a protected characteristic was declared a priority by Polish activists and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs), who say LGBT groups have insufficient legal protection against ‘hate speech’.
At the time, opposition parties in Poland warned against the proposals, arguing that such changes would represent a grave threat to free speech in the country, effectively forcing individuals or groups who question basic tenets of gender ideology to self-censor or face prosecution.
“We strongly oppose this,” said Confederation MP Karina Bosak. “The direct consequence of criminalizing certain words will, in fact, be the criminalization of conservative, religious, Christian views.”
Paweł Szafraniec, from the conservative think-tank Ordo Iuris, echoed this concern, observing that ‘hate speech’ was not as yet defined in Poland’s penal code, and warning that any codified version of the term would inevitably be weaponised to achieve political ends.
“There is no definition of the term ‘hate speech’ in this legislation, only a listing of the categories of people it is intended to protect,” he told Brussels Signal.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he added, “the aim of this legislative draft is not to protect LGBT people but to provide a stick for dealing with opponents of the LGBT movement, to stop them publishing research which questions the demands being made by LGBT activists. It’s a political measure designed to shut people up and thereby to block freedom of speech.”
Since Donald Tusk’s return to power last year he has made good on his campaign promise to use an “iron broom” to sweep away the legacy of eight years of right-wing rule under the Law and Justice (PiS) Party, with his left-leaning administration particularly keen to remove from public office anyone likely to dissent from fashionable orthodoxy around federal European integration, Net Zero policies and ‘woke’ identity politics.
