Katarzyna Kałwak

Judge since 1994, District Court in Olesno

The state should be run in such a way that all the rules of how it should work are clear. That is why we need legal education. It is not surprising that our citizens are lost with this whole circus that surrounds us and all these complicated regulations.

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My mother worked as a fitter at the Polmo Automotive Equipment Plant in Praszka until she retired. There was no tradition of lawyers in the family. A public prosecutor came to talk to the class when I was in high school. I asked him what an auxiliary prosecutor was and I became so interested in law that even though I had bought my chemistry and biology books to become a doctor, I actually went to law school because I was so inspired by the prosecutor.

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There was a requirement to do work experience when I was doing my judicial apprenticeship and I was lucky because it was in court. I started as a court usher, that is the person who receives the mail in the dispatching office and then takes it round all the court offices and collects all court applications. I enjoyed it a great deal because I got to know the court inside out, from the very first letter that came in to the last letter that went out. I saw indictments, inheritance declarations, alimony lawsuits and even entries in the land register. I then became a secretary in the family department and a counsellor in the misdemeanour committee, next an assistant judge and then an actual judge. So what is the ‘service’ that we provide? People place their trust in the courts to resolve their disputes whereas prosecutors want to punish those responsible for committing crimes under the Criminal Code. So what is this ‘service’? It is all about settling a dispute quickly, efficiently, with respect to all the parties involved in the trial, in accordance with the law in a way that is understandable to all parties. Nowadays, however, this ‘service’ has a much deeper dimension and now we have to ensure that the parties receive the full protection of those values and human rights imbued in the Constitution. I cannot envisage it being any different.

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There is a case I often think about when I was an assistant judge at the beginning of my career. A mother and father came to see me with a child that had just been born. It was small, six weeks old. They had come to discuss a ‘closed adoption’ as it is known according to Family Law. What this means in colloquial terms is that they did not want the child and wanted to relinquish all rights to it, and for the child to be adopted in secret. We had had quite a few similar situations in Chorzów in one particular institution and I even wrote to the hospital to provide psychological care for mothers as there seemed to be too many such cases there. It was their fourth child, they already had three, and did not want any more. They seemed like a normal family, not a very poor one. I spent a full four hours in court talking to the parents making them understand that this was an irreversible decision and because it was a unilateral declaration of intent a judge could not oppose it, he or she could only explain the consequences; the father seemed annoyed with what I had to say. Some time passed and I remember being grabbed by the elbow by someone in the street some time after. It was Mother’s Day, I did not have any children at the time, and a woman was standing in front of me and crying, weeping terribly. It was the mother of the child telling me she had “made a terrible mistake and would like to change it”. I could not talk to her there in the street so I invited her inside the court but unfortunately the fate of the child had already been sealed with the closed adoption and it was too late. She did not follow it up. My first child born soon after and ever since, every Christmas and Easter, I think about that situation. What happened to the child? I did all the right things because I said what had to be said but I keep reliving it anyhow.

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A judge is independent which means that when passing a sentence or hearing a case he or she is guided solely by what emerges from the case file and from the laws he or she has interpreted. A judge is free from all social judgment. A judge does not succumb to the pressure of a picket outside the court or any assessment by a politician or from an association in which the defendant, for example, is active. This is what independence means: that a judge will not listen to anyone but him or herself. Our job is a very lonely one and that is why I believe it is so hard to break us because we are always alone.

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Now the politicians have in their hands the instruments needed to expel us from our profession, because of our independence.

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I am aware of how the ‘system’ works. Independent judges like ourselves live under constant pressure that a statement by a politician or an article in a newspaper today comes out followed by a post on government-backed KastaWatch and then out walks a worried-looked prosecutor who “has to investigate everything thoroughly and immediately file a motion to the disciplinary ombudsman for punishment” or the head of the court has to take action to remove a judge from office. There is also Section 231 of the Criminal Code where a judge immediately becomes a criminal and is expelled from the profession. Despite this tense situation, I will not voluntarily resign from the profession. I will not relinquish my office as a judge of the Republic of Poland because I know I was meant to be a judge. I will not give up.