The allegations were found credible by a district court in Warsaw, however the protections granted to MEPs prevented the quartet from being prosecuted in Poland. Now stripped of those protections, the trial will be allowed to commence.
According to the EU Observer, two of the MEPs, Tomasz Piotr Poręba and Beata Mazurek, hail from the ruling nationalist-conservative Law and Justice Party (PiS) while the other two, Patryk Jaki and Beata Kempa, belong to the Catholic-nationalist Sovereign Poland Party.
In 2018, PiS was campaigning in local Polish elections, and one of their advertisements claimed that if their rivals were voted in, the country would be overrun with migrants and that in just two years it would suffer the same fate as many western European nations.
The ad was liked and shared by the aforementioned politicians on Twitter or Facebook, actions which led to complaints being filed against them by prosecutors and then-commissioner for human rights, Adam Bodnar, and Rafał Gaweł, founder of the Centre for Monitoring Racist and Xenophobic Behavior (OMZRiK).
Gaweł, Notes from Poland reports, was convicted of fraud and was granted asylum in Norway after being sentenced to two years in prison.
While prosecutors dismissed the charges of "violating article 256 of Poland's criminal code, which punishes those who incite hatred on the basis of national, ethnic, racial or religious differences," Gaweł was able to file a subsidiary indictment, which bypasses them to notify the Warsaw court of a suspected crime.
Following the decision by the EU Parliament, the politicians took to X to voice their displeasure.
"So this is what the new European state is supposed to look like," Jaki said. "Not only do they refer to the communist manifesto on page one of the new treaty, but they also want to apply its practices. Jail for clicking on the Internet. Widespread censorship, attack on freedom of speech. This is the only way to introduce a communist European state."
"They want to convict us for our likes," Mazurek added. "This is a clear demonstration of arrogance and mockery of law and freedom, the foundations of democracy."
In a statement, OMZRiK claimed the charges were not for something as simple as clicking like, rather, "the deliberate dissemination of racist content on a large scale."
Jaki has since reached out to Elon Musk asking the billionaire to "defend freedom of speech on his platform" by supporting him and his co-defendants in the trial.
