Law and Justice by mouth Jaroslaw Kaczynski told voters directly: we need your money. The National Electoral Commission rejected the financial report of the electoral committee PIS from the last campaign for parliament. As a result, Patria will lose about PLN 57 million and will be deprived of subsidies until the end of the term. PiS wants to fill such a hole in the budget with money from voters. That is why it asked for it at the press conference.
PiS is breaking the law by asking for donations?
And so it began. The fact that donations from citizens are something normal in politics (all parties in the country receive them) did not raise any doubts. However, politicians from the ruling coalition began to wonder in the media whether calling for donations as openly as PiS does is legal?
– Calling for and conducting a public collection is clearly against the regulations and the party should not do it because it is simply illegal and subject to sanctions penalty – he said in Radio Zet Michał Wawrykiewicz, MEP of the Civic Coalition and lawyer. Other lawyers, however, are not as decisive on this issue.
TVN asked three lawyers about it and each of them had the same opinion: what PiS is doing is completely legal. – Making payments for the statutory purposes of the party is completely legal, as is publicly informing about how to do it. Many political parties publish such information on their websites – said Dr. Mateusz Radajewski from the Faculty of Law and Social Communication at SWPS University in Wrocław.
Controversial PESEL request. “It's a violation of regulations”
This does not mean, however, that PiS did not break the law with all this “national collection”. Legal doubts are raised by the information that the party demands in the transfer title. Namely, it wants donors to provide their name, surname, address and PESEL number. Providing this data is justified to some extent, because only people with Polish citizenship residing in Poland can make payments to the party account. However, the addition “residing in the territory of the Republic of Poland” would be sufficient.
Lawyers consider the PESEL number to be an exaggeration. “The implementing provisions of the Act on Political Parties do not authorize the processing of personal data in the form of a PESEL number in relation to persons making payments to thing these parties,” says Wojciech Dąbrówka, lawyer and electoral law expert, in an interview with TVN.
– A PESEL number can be obtained by people who do not have Polish citizenship. A PESEL number does not indicate a place of residence either. Anyone can enter any PESEL number in the transfer title – adds attorney Dr. Paweł Litwiński. – So PiS has nothing to do with PESEL numbers. And if we apply the general principles of GDPR, i.e. the principle of minimalism, collecting this type of excessive data is unacceptable. In my opinion, we can speak of a violation of GDPR regulations here – he said in an interview with TVN.