Waldemar Żurek
Judge since 1999, Regional Court in Kraków
Justice is a deep investigation into the facts of a particular case. Making an effort to examine the facts and apply the law which is absolutely equal for every human being regardless of whether he is a well-dressed gentleman in a sweet-smelling suit or a tramp whose life has thrown him into a dire situation.
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My parents were Solidarity activists and at the end of the communist period, I belonged to the Confederation of Independent Poland (pol. Konfederacja Polski Niepodległa), actually to their Riflemen’s Association (pol. Strzelec) because I was too young to be a full member. I had a junior membership card, I distributed leaflets, painted on walls at night, for example, on the communist party headquarters in Tarnowskie Góry. And because no one believed that communism would fall, I thought about becoming a woodsman. You get your own lodge and I thought about putting an illegal printing press in it because that would be the best place to print illegal leaflets. I graduated from the Forestry Technical Secondary School in Brynek. And then suddenly, the free elections came along so I decided to go and help build the new professional caste of our new, independent country. I had to really catch up on the humanities to be accepted at the Jagiellonian University Law School in Kraków. I studied part-time in the first year but by the second year I was able to become a regular day student because I had a high grade point average.
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A case which I think about often, in terms of what it means to be a judge in an ideal sense, was the eviction of a mother and her three children by the local council. During the second instance proceedings the mother described how: “One child is in a room with no furniture, he is connected to various machines because he has a genetic defect and he has to be in bed all the time. He sometimes needs respiratory assistance. I do everything I can so that my child doesn’t get bedsores; I can’t go to the shop because I don’t have time; I don’t have the money to pay the medical expenses because I don’t work. The second child has muscular dystrophy and the third is visually impaired. All these children are sick – that’s just the way things have worked out for us. And my husband left me. I’m all alone and, to make matters worse, the local council has evicted me. I survive only on benefit and the allowances I get for my children. Volunteers also help out”. We have a panel of three judges and are in a dilemma. I say, “Listen, either this woman is lying or it is a real tragedy and the council has not understood the situation she is in. Taking these children away to some institution that will take care of them will not only generate costs but break up the family, but the children will not have a mother”. Unusually for a judge in a second instance court, I go on a visit, alone. The court appoints a panel of three people including a local councillor who is horrified when he sees the situation. His documents read: “the woman does not pay, you have to evict her”. We go to her place and see that she had remodelled the bathroom in order to be able to bathe her children in a special sunken bathtub and she has also made a mechanical hoist so she can lift her children more easily. Even the bed had a hoist so that a child lying down could be properly washed. She deserved a medal but the council wanted to evict her and it was only the visitation that dispelled all our dilemmas. Legally, the case was simple but I will remember it for years to come. I also remember the mother sending the court a thank-you letter of sorts years later.
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There is one moment we all fear in our professional lives and it is connected to our personal lives: the fear of not being able to get up and go to work for health reasons. This fear is very real to me because I had a bizarre experience that brought it all home to me. I was hit by a cleaning machine while walking down the corridor in my own court. The operator lost control and it pinned me against a door. My knee had to be operated on. My employer did not want to recognise it as a work-related accident and for four months refused to give me access to the CCTV footage or disclose the person who was carrying out the cleaning work. No Accident Commission was set up and I had to write to the State Labour Inspectorate to have the evidence disclosed to me because the corridor was empty when it happened and there were no witnesses. Obviously, my employer broke the rules because they had a duty to begin an investigation into the accident to ascertain whether or not it was an accident. Now I am fighting the issue against them in court. I had surgery on my knee, anticoagulant injections and soon after the treatment on my knee finished, I got pneumonia which I could not recover from for six weeks. I was lying there with a high fever, the doctor shaking his head wondering what to do because despite giving me a batch of new antibiotics, nothing was working.
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I am still really tired and it is not easy to do my job calmly because of what is going on around the judiciary. It is so terribly draining as I have to constantly keep making arrangements with my attorneys as to when I might have a disciplinary hearing and pick up the official letters from them: sometimes I get two a week, sometimes four. The interrogations, the hate, and having to have twenty attorneys fighting for the rule of law.
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In my opinion there is one thing that cannot be quickly rebuilt and that is authority. It remains my greatest tragedy, my family’s greatest tragedy. They were proud to have a husband, father, and son who was a decent, honest man, and who grew out of a drive for independence. I cannot be accused of being a child of the post-communists. You can create an institution from scratch but how can you make society accept court rulings? We have always had this problem in Poland. We are already close to the world average when it comes to social acceptance of court judgments and respect for judges, even though our system does not always deserve it, but after thirty years of being an independent judge and after a new generation of judges who knows what it means to have independent courts because everything has collapsed. This I cannot accept.
