Prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek withdrew her resignation, job at the Ministry of Justice

Last Friday, the head of the Ministry of Justice met Adam Bodnar with prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek. A day earlier, Bodnar announced that during the meeting he would encourage her to withdraw her resignation. He also admitted that, in accordance with the procedure, he cannot refuse to dismiss a prosecutor who resigned from his position.

On Friday, Dobies reported that Wrzosek withdrew her application after another conversation with the Minister of Justice.

– The prosecutor will now support the minister in his work as a prosecutor delegated to the Ministry of Justice and will act as the minister's advisor on the conditions of prosecutorial service. This is not a promotion, but a delegation, so a kind of transfer of the prosecutor to work in the ministry – said Dobies.

He noted that today's information is the “first signal”, and details regarding the further work of Prosecutor Wrzosek will be worked out in the coming days.

In a letter dated September 13 to Adam Bodnar, Ewa Wrzosek, as a prosecutor of the Warsaw-Mokotów District Prosecutor's Office, asked “for dismissal from the position of prosecutor within the statutory deadline general organizational unit of the prosecutor's office to resign from the position.” The prosecutor referred to Article 93, paragraph 2 of the Law on the Public Prosecutor's Office.

Proc. Wrzosek works at the Warsaw-Mokotów District Prosecutor's Office, where she started in 1999. At the end of last year, she was also appointed by Bodnar as a member of the National Council of Prosecutors. For years, she has been associated with the Lex Super Omnia Association of Prosecutors, which demands, among other things, depoliticization of the prosecutor's office.

Prosecutor Wrzosek also worked in other units, including the district prosecutor's offices of Warsaw-Żoliborz, Warsaw-Wola and Warsaw-Ochota. In April 2020 initiated a high-profile investigation into the organization of the presidential elections during the pandemic.

On the same day, the superior took the case away from Wrzosek and discontinued the investigation, and the then national prosecutor, Bogdan Święczkowski (now a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal), ordered the initiation of disciplinary proceedings against Wrzosek.

In January 2021, Wrzosek She was among several prosecutors delegated by their superiors to work in remote units. The prosecutor was sent to work in Śrem, 310 kilometers away from Warsaw.

Those decisions sparked opposition from some of the legal community. According to some associations of judges and prosecutors, the delegations were intended to have a “chilling effect” and were repressive in nature. According to prosecutor Wrzosek, sending her to a distant prosecutor's office was an attempt to silence and harass her in connection with the initiation of an investigation into the organization of postal elections.

According to the Canadian group Citizen Lab, prosecutor Wrzosek is one of the people under surveillance by the Pegasus system. This information was recently confirmed by the prosecutor meeting of the parliamentary investigative committee on Pegasus. She stated that on November 23, 2021, she received information from Apple about surveillance. – The messages sent by Apple clearly stated that this cyber attack on my phone was undertaken by state services because of who I am or what I do – she noted.

At the end of March, the National Prosecutor's Office announced that an investigation was underway investigation in relation to the publication of Wirtualna Polska regarding prosecutor Wrzosek. Wirtualna Polska published an article which shows that when it submitted applications to the courts to block the activities PIS regarding public media after the elections of October 15 last year, there were irregularities because the applications could have been created outside the prosecutor's office.

Referring to this conduct, Bodnar emphasized that it did not interfere with her daily work and did not change the fact that she should continue to work. – There are many different proceedings pending against prosecutors and conducted by the internal affairs department – said the head of the Ministry of Justice on Radio Zet.