Poland in the Council of Europe

The seminar, chaired by Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Arkadiusz Mularczyk, was attended by diplomats and parliamentarians of Council of Europe member states.

At the beginning, minister Mularczyk pointed out that the purpose of the meeting was to discuss the issue of access to courts and ensuring the possibility of a fair trial for the victims of German crimes committed during World War II. He recalled that in January as the head of the Polish delegation to PACE, he initiated the adoption of a resolution entitled "The issue of the right to fair and equal reparation and access to courts and fair trials for all victims of German aggression during World War II", which was supported by 33 members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the CoE (from Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Great Britain, Sweden, Romania , Serbia, France, Azerbaijan, the Netherlands and Lithuania). He stressed that it is our duty to establish a legal system that will counteract injustice and inequality in treatment. Poland and its citizens suffered the greatest losses during WWII, and due to the Soviet occupation after the war, they had no opportunity to pursue their rights. The minister cited examples of other countries that had been paid individual compensation (eg. Great Britain for Kenya).

Representatives of Ukraine, Greece and the Netherlands took part in the discussion, thanking the Polish side for taking up such an important topic on the forum. Christina Stamouli (Greece), member of the National Council for the Investigation of German Compensations, discussed the so-called Case of Distom. On June 10, 1944, in retaliation for an attack by Greek partisans, SS troops carried out a pacification action in the village of Distomo near Delphi. As a result of this incident, 218 people died. Relatives of the victims of the massacre sought compensation from the German state in the Greek courts in the 1990s.
Then the Italian lawyer Filippo Biole emphasized that similar cases against Germany were pending in Italy. For example, in 2008, the local Supreme Court ruled that the families of nine civilians murdered by Nazi soldiers in Tuscany are entitled to compensation from Germany in the amount of 800,000. euro.

At the end of the event, min. Arkadiusz Mularczyk reminded about the need to develop a PACE resolution on just and equal compensation, which should be an important point of reference for further discussions and work in multilateral forums, as well as in the dialogue between the interested states. He recalled that on April 24, The Office of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) decided to forward the request of the head of the Polish delegation entitled: The question of the right to just and equal redress and the access to court and a fair trial for all victims of the German aggression during the Second World War to PACE Legal and Human Rights Committee. The request is to be taken into account in the preparation of the PACE resolution on fair and equal redress entitled “Reparation and reconciliation processes to overcome past conflicts and build a common peaceful future – the question of just and equal redress”.