Zbigniew Ziobro, Poland’s former justice minister, has arrived in the United States, he announced Sunday, as prosecutors in Warsaw opened an investigation Monday into whether he received help evading criminal charges at home.
Poland’s national prosecutor’s office said in a social media post that it was investigating Ziobro’s whereabouts and looking into whether other individuals assisted him in “fleeing and evading criminal liability, thereby obstructing the investigation into the justice fund.”
Ziobro told the right-wing Polish broadcaster Republika on Sunday that he had entered the U.S. the previous day—coinciding with the inauguration in Budapest of Péter Magyar, who defeated longtime Hungarian nationalist leader Viktor Orbán in last month’s election. Ziobro said he was using a document granted to him along with his right to asylum in Hungary, where he had been since January, according to the state news agency PAP.
Ziobro was a key figure in the Law and Justice government that ran Poland between 2015 and 2023, overseeing an effort that gave political control over the courts, stacked higher benches with friendly judges, and punished critics with disciplinary actions or faraway assignments. In October, prosecutors asked parliament to lift his immunity so they could charge him, alleging among other things that he misused a fund for victims of violence to purchase Israeli Pegasus surveillance software.
The current government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk—which came to power in late 2023 promising to undo those judicial changes but has been blocked by two successive presidents aligned with the nationalist right—says Law and Justice used Pegasus to spy illegally on political opponents. Ziobro says he acted lawfully.
Polish Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek posted Sunday evening that Warsaw had invalidated Ziobro’s travel documents, including his diplomatic passport, and that Poland will ask the United States and Hungary about the legal basis for Ziobro to leave Hungarian territory and enter America.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maciej Wewiór told The Associated Press that “we don’t want this issue to become political.”
“Our relationship with the U.S. goes much deeper than what happens with Ziobro,” he said. “But we do want our citizen to eventually return to Poland and face justice.”