Sexual Harassment Allegations Plague Poland's Deputy PM

Andrzej Lepper, Poland's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Agriculture, on Monday denied a newspaper report alleging he and another member of his populist Samoobrona (Self Defence) farmers' party had demanded sexual favours from a woman in exchange for a job in the party.

The woman, identified only as Aneta K., told Poland's liberal Gazeta Wyborcza daily that in 2001 she was recruited by Samoobrona Member of Parliament Stanislaw Lyzwinski to work in his constituency office on condition she be prepared to grant sexual favours.

Aneta K., alleges she was given the job after having sex with Lepper. At the time, he was a member of parliament and did not hold a government post. She was required to continue performing sexual favours to keep her job, she claims.

She said she agreed to do so because she was an unemployed single mother desperately seeking a job to support her family.

Lepper on Monday flatly denied the allegations, saying the woman in question had not been employed by his party.

In an interview with TVN24 news channel, he appeared to know details of the woman's family background and even questioned her moral integrity as an unmarried mother of three children.

Several other women quoted by Gazeta Wyborcza also alleged Lyzwinski solicited sexual favours from them in exchange for employment in Samoobrona party structures.

Following Monday consultations with Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski, Poland's chief prosecutor Janusz Kaczmarek launched an investigation into the sex abuse allegations against Lepper and Lyzwinski, government spokesman Jan Dziedziczak confirmed.

Meanwhile, opposition politicians called for Lepper's immediate dismissal from his ministerial posts.

Another Samoobrona member, serving as a member of the European Parliament, recently faced allegations of raping a sex worker in Belgium.

At the time, Lepper was harshly criticised for his light-hearted reaction to the allegations. "How can you rape a prostitute?," he asked reporters as he chuckled.

The populist Samoobrona party controls 47 seats in Poland's 460 seat parliament. It entered a rocky three-way coalition which guarantees a majority to the right-wing conservative Law and Justice (PiS) government of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

The government's other junior coalition partner, the 29-seat Catholic-nationalist League of Polish Families (LPR), came under fire last week for alleged links to neo-Nazis.

Polish media published videos and photographs appearing to show LPR deputy party leader Wojciech Wierzejski and a party administrative assistant attending a neo-Nazi style party and a concert oranised by the All-Poland Youth - the LPR's youth wing.

Roman Giertych, at once LPR leader Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister has flatly denied any links to either of the events and filed a criminal complaint against the organisers of one of the neo-Nazi parties.

The public propagation of totalitarian ideologies, including communism and fascism, is illegal in Poland.

Giertych is also known as the principal mentor of the All-Poland Youth.

© 2006 DPA

Cold war shadow disrupts Russia talks

Summit in Helsinki opens in disarray as Poland blocks talks on new pact taking in energy and human rights.

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Poland's rulers are neocons. Go figure.

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Staff and agencies
Friday November 24, 2006
Guardian Unlimited

An EU-Russia summit in Helsinki opened in disarray today after Poland blocked the start of talks on a new wide-ranging pact, taking in energy and human rights.
Russia and the EU were supposed to begin talks on a Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA), the fundamental text on trade and other issues to replace an existing agreement that ends next year.

The start of the talks was to have been the centrepiece of the summit, but Poland, in a dispute with Moscow over meat imports, wielded its veto.

The European commission can only start negotiations when all 25 EU member states have given it a mandate to do so. Poland - to the exasperation of other EU governments - became the first new member state to use its veto to block talks with a third country.
Poland's veto came in response to a Russian ban on its meat products. Russian authorities accuse Polish producers of violating hygiene laws and smuggling, although Moscow says there is no problem with the quality of Polish produce itself.

Warsaw retorts that the import ban was punishment for its embrace of the west and turning its back on its former imperial master.

The Polish veto was an embarrassing setback for the EU as it seeks agreement with Russia - its biggest energy supplier - over the security of future oil and gas supplies, and on democracy and human rights.

"Of course it would be better not to have it (the Polish veto) but we are going to keep on working," the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said as he arrived at the summit. "The situation will be overcome."

Energy is the thorniest issue between the EU and Russia. With the EU increasingly dependent on oil and gas from Russia, European governments want to ensure security of access and open up Russian oil and gas deposits and export pipelines to European companies.

"Energy is the key and the most difficult issue in EU-Russia relations, and there can be no immediate breakthrough at the summit. Talks may drag on for years," Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs magazine, told the Associated Press.

Russia and 50 other countries have signed the so-called Energy Charter, a treaty that took effect in 1998, setting out terms for trading and transporting energy across the Eurasian landmass. Moscow will not ratify it nor conclude a transit protocol with the EU that would force Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, to surrender its monopoly on transporting gas from Turkmenistan.

"It's out of the question that Russia will submit to EU pressure to ratify the charter," Konstantin Kosachev, the head of the Russian parliament's international affairs committee, told The Associated Press.

The EU sees the PCA as a way of getting the charter's language into a treaty, without requiring Russian ratification of the original Energy Charter.

Apart from energy, negotiations for a new partnership accord promise to be lengthy. The two sides have identified four key sectors - economic, justice, external security and research matters - as areas for closer cooperation.

On human rights, Russian officials said if EU chiefs challenged Mr Putin over his record he would counter by pointing to the treatment of ethnic Russians in new EU members Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Moscow says they suffer discrimination.

The death of Alexander Litvinenko in London - three weeks after the former KGB agent and fierce Putin critic apparently ingested a mysterious poison - also hung over the Helsinki summit.

The Finnish prime minister, Matti Vanhanen, whose country holds the EU presidency, expressed sympathy to Mr Litvinenko's family but declined to say whether he would press Mr Putin about the death.

Russia has rejected claims from Mr Litvinenko's friends it had a hand in the poisoning. A Kremlin spokesman said Mr Litvinenko's death was "a tragedy."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/eu/story/0,,1956307,00.html