Refugees become electoral fodder in Poland; no more dead pregnant women

PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski announced on Thursday the party’s intention to organise a referendum on whether Poles want to receive refugees as part of a new Europe-wide relocation scheme to be potentially implemented once the new EU migration pact is in place. According to those proposals, a country not wanting to accept refugees on its territory will instead contribute 20,000 euros yearly per rejected refugee. Poland has been opposing the proposal, arguing it has done enough by helping millions of Ukrainian refugees since the war started, a million of whom continue to live in Poland. Kaczynski also said the referendum would take place on the same day as parliamentary elections this autumn, leading observers to comment that the PiS leader intends to exploit negative feelings towards the Ukrainians as a way to generate votes, a formula that has worked in the past for the party, contributing to its 2015 victory.

Thousands of women protested on Wednesday evening in about 70 locations across Poland, after another woman died after doctors in the hospital delayed performing an abortion to prolong the life of the foetus despite the mother’s life being at risk. The 33-year-old Dorota died on May 23 in a hospital in Nowy Targ, after coming to the ER when her waters broke prematurely. According to the husband, instead of informing the family that the foetus had hardly any chance of surviving, the medical staff told Dorota to lie on her back with her legs propped up, as this would help the waters “return”. After three days, the woman developed sepsis and died. There are at least five known cases of women dying in similar circumstances since the Polish constitutional court banned in 2020 abortions even in cases where the foetus was compromised. Many say the ruling has had a chilling effect on doctors, who are more afraid now to risk performing abortions. Women’s rights activists, however, have pointed out that abortions when the mother’s life is at stake are still legal and have called on doctors to act more bravely and responsibly.

In a key ruling on Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided that banks could not demand extra fees from customers for mortgage contracts that had been invalidated by courts. The ruling could impact tens of thousands of borrowers who took out mortgages in Swiss franc and whose monthly rates exploded over the past years for multiple reasons as the zloty has weakened. Borrowers have been challenging some aspects of the mortgage contracts in Polish courts – and usually winning. But some banks started demanding compensation for customers’ “non-contractual use of the capital borrowed” during the period of the contract, even if now invalidated. Once borrowers challenged these penalties, a Warsaw court asked the ECJ for an opinion. “Any annulment of the mortgage loan agreement is a consequence of the banks’ use of unfair terms,” the ECJ said in the ruling. “Therefore, it can neither be accepted that the bank derives economic advantages from its unlawful conduct, nor that it be compensated for the disadvantages caused by such conduct.”