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The second day of the conference started with a panel discussion on “Does nothing justify use of tortures?”, in which adv. Mikołaj Pietrzak was one of the speakers. Mikołaj Pietrzak referred to the speech that the President of the United States of America, Barack Obama gave during his last visit in Poland, in which he mentioned and emphasized human rights protection. In response, adv. Mikołaj Pietrzak recalled the issue of torture used in the secret CIA prisons.

During the later debate, the participants discussed methods and roles of men in using torture and the reasons that so little attention is paid to this issue in democratic countries.

The participants of this panel discussion also included: Gerald Staberock, the Chairman of the World Organization Against Torture; Andrzej Poczobut, a journalist of the daily newspaper “Gazeta Wyborcza”, a dissident and political prisoner of Łukaszenko’s regime; and Rasul Jafarov, a human rights activist from the Republic of Azerbaijan.

The article can be read here

[Joanna Brzezińska, Małgorzata Zagawa, Panel dyskusyjny: „Nic nie usprawiedliwia stosowania tortur?”, www.igrzyskawolnosci.pl, 05.06.2014]

Both the defender of Radislav Krstić, adv. Mikolaj Pietrzak, and the Polish Prosecutor applied to the District Court in Warsaw to impose a penalty of 25 years of imprisonment. According to the District Court in Warsaw, that is the only possible length of a prison sentence for R. Kristić in Poland. In the grounds for the decision, Judge Tomasz Calkiewicz emphasized that according to the Polish law the only possible sentences for crimes committed by Krstić were 25 years of imprisonment or life imprisonment .

In 1995, Radislav Krstić led the assault on the Muslim enclave in Srebrnica, where soldiers conducted a mass execution of about 8 thousand people. Radislav Krstić was detained in 1998 and in 2001, as the first criminal from the former Yugoslavia, was sentenced to 46 years of imprisonment by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague. In 2012, the Tribunal applied to Poland to enable Kristić to serve his prison sentence in Poland.

The article can be read here

[Serbski zbrodniarz w polskim więzieniu: Kara 25 lat, www.rmf24.pl, 26.05.2014]