Defend Polish communists!

by New Worker correspondent

 

 The persecution of the Communist Party of Poland continues. The trial against the members of the editorial board of the party's newspaper Brzask (Dawn) is scheduled to restart new month. The first court session will be held on the 3^rd March. The trial has gone on for over four years despite the acquittal verdict of the court issued last year. The appeal of the prosecutor was the basis for restarting the trial. For the last four years, the prosecutors' office has been directly subordinated to the government. This trial is a part of a campaign made by the state authorities to ban the Communist Party of Poland.

Another anti-communist attack is an attempt to criminalise communist activity by changes of the penal code. The amended article 256 of the code bans communism and equates it with Nazism and fascism. Previously it penalised communists under the law that banned the promotion of “fascist or other totalitarian systems of the state". In recent years this law was used very widely as shown in the trial of the CPP and Brzask. The new version of the law bans the ideology, symbols or any other content (including prints and recordings) associated with communism. The new code also increases the penalty from two to three years of imprisonment. These changes were voted by parliament last year and were sent to the Constitutional Court.

This repression is accompanied by an anti-communist policy of rewriting history and removing monuments and names of the streets associated with communism and workers' movement from the public space. But the renaming of streets campaign was halted following protests throughout the country.

Polish communists are calling for the immediate halt to all the prosecutions against the communists and penalisation of communist ideas in Poland. The Communist Party of Poland is calling on communist and workers parties throughout the world to demonstrate their solidarity with the Polish communists on an international day of action on 2^nd March. They call for solidarity protests including petitions and holding demonstrations outside Polish embassies on the day.