“To jest wojna!” The defence of human rights in Poland – An Interview with Monika Tichy

Date published: 14.04.2021

The walls are closing in on civil society in Europe and globally. Human rights violations are part of the day-to-day life of many citizens. These regressions of fundamental rights and attacks on civil society increasingly diminish the democratic space for activism and threaten the safety of its defenders. In this interview series, Hafiza Merkezi Berlin wants to highlight the struggles for human rights and against the shrinking civic space by interviewing the people on the frontlines. In these national and transnational cases, we find patterns of attacks, but also examples of local, national, and transnational solidarity that empowers and equips civil society in the struggle.
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Pictures from the anti-abortion protests in Poland flooded the media in the autumn of 2020. But it is only the tip of the iceberg of Polish civil society struggling against infringement of women’s and LGBTI+-rights by the government. Influenced by the Catholic Church and right-wing legal organisations such as Ordo Iuris, the PiS-government is pushing increasingly hard against women and the LGBTI+ community. Especially rural communities are struggling with little (financial) support. 

Rebekka Pflug met with Monika Tichy, the founder of the LGBTI+-organisation Lambda, on behalf of Hafiza Merkezi Berlin, to discuss the current threats in Poland, the international solidarity she experiences, and the ways in which the European Union can support the struggle of the Polish civil society.

In January 2021, the Polish Constitutional Court has decided to severely restrict access to abortion for women* in Poland. Many people have been protesting/protested against it, very notably since last autumn. Can you tell me about the organisation and forms of the protests?

Monika Tichy (MT): To understand the current protests, knowing the background is important: 

Since 1956, abortions were regulated by a relatively liberal law in the People’s Republic of Poland. Since 1993, Poland has had one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the European Union (EU). This is due in particular to the influence of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church had supported the Solidarność movement, the democracy movement at the end of the 1980s. The Church expected some sort of “paying back” from politicians originating from Solidarność. Under the threat of not supporting them in the next election, clergy demanded a lot of privileges, from large financial benefits to forcing catechism rules through civil law. It is not only about the fact that the abortion law was further tightened with the decision of the Constitutional Court, it was already very restrictive before February, and the decision made abortion almost impossible. But it’s about further expanding the political power of the Catholic Church and being able to exert more and more political influence. Since 2016, the Catholic Church has been trying to tighten the abortion law indirectly through organisations that are ideologically close to it, such as Ordo Iuris. Since then, we have been protesting on the streets again and again. Now it has succeeded because the Constitutional Court in Poland no longer rules independently, it is now a PiS-Constitutional-Court.

What is interesting about the protests in autumn and winter is that not only women* took to the streets in the big cities: All over the country, women*, men*, young, old, queer people are protesting. The protests are organised by the Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet. One of the initiators of the organisation is Marta Lempart. She is also involved in the protests in defense of an independent judiciary in Poland and campaigns for the rights of queer people and people with disabilities. In February 2021, it was reported that charges had been brought against Lempart for, among other things, putting the health and lives of others at risk during the Corona pandemic. She would face up to eight years in prison. Such charges affect many activists, including me. Due to the long time, the cold winter, the pandemic, we have become a bit tired and the protests are shifting to the internet. We hope to be able to start more physical actions again in the summer, so a LGBTI+ Pride in Szczecin (Stettin) is also planned for September, which had to be canceled last year because of the pandemic.

For me, both issues go hand in hand and I believe that those two topics, sexual minorities, and other minorities rights, are strongly connected to women*’s rights because right-wing conservatives and religious-based fundamentalists always target all of these groups when they come to power in order to build authoritarian rule, which was exemplified in history many times.

And so our demands are:

First of all to have full reproductive rights – Legalize abortion. This also includes maintaining standards of care around childbirth, access to modern free contraception and sterilisation, access to safe abortions, subsidies for in vitro fertilisation prenatal examinations. We also demand serious sexual education in schools, which corresponds to scientific findings and not to Catholic moral teaching and which is therefore also intersectional.

The struggle for reproductive rights and rights for LGBTI+ affects all countries, including all European countries. For example, 50 years ago the abortion law in Sweden was restrictive and women* went to Poland to have an abortion. How are you networked with other NGOs, initiatives within Europe?

MT: Oh yes, there are many connections especially between the LGBTI+ groups in Europe, I am particularly connected to “Make Poland Queer Again” in London, and the Berlin Pride organizers. 

These groups support LGBTI+ people in Poland on many dimensions including financial support. Especially raising the funds helps us a lot! Because we don’t get funding from the government in Poland and this creates a very big problem for NGOs We sometimes get funding from the local governments, but only in the west of Poland and not in the east. Local authorities in the conservative South-East also create as many obstacles as they can when Prides are being organized. We recently started a project forming more direct partnerships between small towns in Poland and small NGOs, not only with the central and bigger NGOs in Europe. So people can get to know each other better and support each other more easily – also in an emotional way, which is very important for us, especially because we are under so much pressure from our government, the Catholic Church, and some social organisations.

And now we are in the process of expanding the network of contacts. Luckily in Poland, we have a central federation – “Congress of Marching Cities”, which connects pride organisers. So it is easier to spread the information and the invitation to cooperate in such areas.

It’s the same for the feminist groups: As I told you, there is Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet, but there are also many small groups in the small towns. In addition, there are organisations in many European states, that support women* in their reproductive rights. In the meantime, some have joined together to form the organisation Abortion Dream Team. Organisations from the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Vienna, Poland, and so on are involved. Abortion Dream Team mainly helps women* to get abortions when they want across national borders in collaboration.

The news of Turkey’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention shocked many. But the Polish Minister of Justice, Zbigniew Ziobro, had already announced last summer that Poland is also planning to withdraw from the Convention. Is this an outlook of what will happen in Poland?

MT: Well, the government would do it willingly.

But the government probably won’t do it soon because they do not want to attract more international attention. That’s the only thing they pay attention to. The government doesn’t listen to the protests; they can sit out the protests. It’s like what happened with the abortion law: first,  a huge number of people protested, but after three months during winter, when we were on the streets almost every day, fewer and fewer people joined. And that was what they were expecting and at that very moment, the ruling went into effect in February.

I hope that they might not want to draw more international attention to it, however, they will still do it at the lower level. They have already, let’s say, left the Istanbul Convention because they are not implementing it: The government is not doing anything they are obliged to do.

Let me give an example: The Ministry of Justice had spent a lot of money to be able to help victims of crime, i.e. through funding the shelters for women* who have fled abusive partners. Since the PiS has been in government, these funds are being cut, and instead the money is being spent on fighting LGBTI+ people and women*’s rights activists. It is called “helping victims of Christianophobia and crimes against moral sense”.

I would say it’s a bad joke. It could be some kind of political cabaret or surreal political fiction, but it is happening right now in the country that is a member of the European Union and lives in Central Europe in 2020 and 2021.

And that is why another demand of the Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet is: We also want to change the definition of rape. It is a very important issue. Because the practice in courts right now is that the burden of proof lies with the victim. Most of the time, victims are asked in court questions like: what were you wearing, where have you been, were you drunk? And this completely turns the situation around, because it should be the perpetrator who is asked such questions.

This illustrates the institutional treatment of women* and other marginalised groups in Poland: Their rights are already not protected, not even respected.

With a large cross-party majority, the European Parliament (EP) adopted a resolution granting Polish women* the right to sexual self-determination and warning against the restriction of women*’s fundamental rights. Also, two years after the first Polish local authority declared itself an ‘‘LGBTI+-free zone’’, the EP declared the EU to be an ‘‘LGBTI+ Freedom Zone’’ in March. These initiatives are responses to the nationwide protests and to the backsliding of LGBTI+ rights in some EU countries, notably Poland and Hungary. How important do you see the role of the EU?

MT: The support from the EU, especially from the European Parliament, is very important for us! We were very happy about the “LGBTI+ Freedom Zone’’, it’s a great and important sign!

As I said, there are two things that help us a lot: On the one hand, financial support, on the other hand, keep reporting about the protests and the current situation in Poland.

That is why the “LGBTI+ Freedom Zone’’ is so important. The media reported about it and then every article said how bad the situation is in Poland – and also for our friends in Hungary. But it is also good when Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) make and maintain contact with national or local politicians in Poland. If they are taking this knowledge back to Brussels and report on us, that’s extremely important for us, because our voice is heard, and we do not remain alone in our country.

It is also helpful/supportive when MEPs stand up for us: When mechanisms are used that can help and protect us. For example, the rule of law conditionality. So linking the disbursement of EU funds to this rule of law mechanism, in short: money to values. What the EU has to stop: financing the deconstruction of the legal systems in Hungary and Poland. It will hit the government in Poland the hardest if the financial support from the EU disappears or lessens. That would be the biggest problem. But what would help us the most is when money from the EU goes directly to groups like Lambda or Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet.

Monika Tichy was born and raised in Szczecin (Stettin, a city neighbouring Germany) in Poland. Since the party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice, PiS) came to power in 2015, Monika Tichy has been particularly committed to LGBTI+ rights and women*’s rights. She is the founder of the  LGBTI+ organisation Lambda and among the organisers of Pride Marches in Szczecin. She participates in most organised Prides all over Poland, including the March in Białystok in 2019, which was heavily attacked. She is also actively involved in Women’s Strike, which has been organising protests against the abortion ban in Poland, especially since autumn 2020. In addition, Monika Tichy works as a freelance journalist, filmmaker, photographer, and writer.

Rebekka Pflug is a political scientist and research assistant at the Europa-Universität Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) with a focus on the political and legal systems in Eastern European states. Her work focuses on abortion and migration law as well as protest research. Rebekka heads the regional group Berlin-Brandenburg of the Junge DGO of the German Society for Eastern European Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde e.V., DGO). Twitter: @RebekkaPflug