2 convicted ex-Polish ministers held

Police in Poland have arrested two former ministers in the latest major confrontation between the new, pro-European Union coalition that runs the country and the former administration of the right-wing Law and Justice party, or PiS.

Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wasik, the country's former interior minister and deputy interior minister, were taken into custody at the presidential palace in Warsaw on Tuesday, after failing to hand themselves to the authorities following their convictions last month for abuse of power over crimes committed in 2007, when the men were in charge of a government anti-corruption office.

Kaminski is starting a hunger strike, he said in a statement on Wednesday.

"I declare that I treat my conviction... as an act of political revenge," Kaminski said in the statement, read by his former deputy Blazej Pobozy at a news conference in front of the prime minister's office. "As a political prisoner, I started a hunger strike from the first day of my imprisonment."

In December, the pair, who were still serving as PiS lawmakers, were sentenced to two years in custody, but they refused to accept the court's decision because staunch PiS ally President Andrzej Duda had pardoned them back in 2015.

The arrests, which followed the country's Supreme Court ruling that the president's pardon was invalid and a standoff at the presidential palace, prompted the current interior minister, Marcin Kierwinski, to write on X, "Everyone is equal before the law."

Widening the gulf

The incident will, however, have widened the gulf between the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Law and Justice party, which came to power last month, and Duda, who insisted his pardon should have been respected.

The two sides are also divided on whether Kaminski and Wasik remain lawmakers, with Tusk's government insisting they have been stripped of their roles, and Duda saying they are still lawmakers.

Before his arrest, Kaminski told reporters from the grounds of the presidential palace that he and Wasik were about to become "political prisoners".

"We are dealing with a very serious state crisis," he said. "A grim dictatorship is being created."

Tusk, who was president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019, came to power after eight years of rule by former prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki ended with him failing to win a vote of confidence following weeks of wrangling about who should form the next government in the wake of October's indecisive general election.

Tusk, who has described the previous administration in similar terms as the "grim dictatorship" invoked by Kaminski, told reporters Duda appeared to have been trying to help convicted men evade justice.

"There is no rulebook for the prime minister or interior minister on how to act when convicts are in the presidential palace," he said ahead of the arrests that prompted protests from PiS supporters at both the palace and the police headquarters where the men were taken.

Tusk's party campaigned during the general election on undoing controversial changes PiS had made to the country's legal system, its media, and its civil service that the EU described as undemocratic and illegal.

Reuters contributed to this story.

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