Poland has said it expects Washington to extradite a former justice minister wanted on criminal charges after reports emerged that he had fled to the US from Hungary, where the former prime minister Viktor Orbán had granted him asylum.
“You can’t hide these days. You can flee, you can delay it for a while, but eventually your options run out,” Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, said on Monday in reference to Zbigniew Ziobro.
Polish prosecutors have said they are investigating how Ziobro, who played a key role in Poland’s previous nationalist conservative government, had managed to leave Hungary and enter the US on the same day as the inauguration of Orbán’s successor, Péter Magyar.
Ziobro “is wanted by the Polish prosecution service, and our prosecution service will of course apply to court to ask for an international arrest warrant, both European and international”, Sikorski told the Guardian in an interview in Warsaw.
“And of course we expect friendly countries to honour our request.”
Ziobro, who was stripped of his Polish and diplomatic passports last year, made his presence in the US known on Sunday. “I am in the United States,” he told the rightwing Polish broadcaster Republika, saying he had arrived in the “strongest democracy in the world” a day earlier.
Polish prosecutors said Ziobro was wanted under a domestic warrant. “Zbigniew Ziobro has not had a passport for many months, so one thing is certain. He certainly did not enter the United States under general rules,” Przemysław Nowak, a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, told reporters on Monday. “Everything suggests the suspect … has chosen to continue evading the Polish justice system.”
Magyar said last month that Hungary would no longer harbour Ziobro, leading many to assume that Poland would be able to put him on trial.
He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted on charges of abuse of power. Prosecutors have accused him of creating and leading a criminal group that diverted funds from victims of violence to use for his own interests, including to buy Israeli Pegasus spyware to allegedly monitor political opponents.
Ziobro has denied the charges, describing them as fabricated and accusing the centrist Polish government led by Donald Tusk of carrying out a personal vendetta against him.
Poland’s foreign ministry said it would seek answers internationally. “We will ask both the United States and Hungary for the legal and factual basis on which Zbigniew Ziobro left Hungarian territory,” a spokesperson told Reuters.
“And specifically, what document allowed him to cross the border and gave him the right to enter the United States … We hope that this situation will be resolved and that it will not affect the very good relations between the United States and Poland.”
Ziobro told Republika he had entered the US using the asylum documents provided to him by Hungary. “These are well-known procedures associated with granting a citizen the right of asylum,” he said.
The Polish news site Onet reported that Ziobro had received a US journalist visa linked to Republika. The broadcaster, long aligned with the Polish right, later said it had hired the ex-justice minister as its political commentator in the US.
The Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the US president, Donald Trump, was personally involved in securing Ziobro a visa, overriding objections from the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, and the US ambassador in Warsaw, Tom Rose.
Rose had recently reassured Sikorski that the US would not provide shelter to Ziobro, the newspaper added. The US state department did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Monday.
The questions regarding Ziobro’s travel come weeks after Magyar said that Hungary would no longer shelter people wanted elsewhere.
“Hungary will no longer be a dumping ground for internationally wanted criminals,” he said after his landslide victory, citing Ziobro and his former deputy, Marcin Romanowski, by name.
The whereabouts of Romanowski are unclear. Polish officials have accused him of corruption and abusing funds meant to help victims of crime. He denies any wrongdoing.
The current Polish justice minister, Waldemar Zurek, said Poland had for months been taking “every possible step” to ensure that Ziobro was brought to justice. “We will not cease our efforts to ensure that he and Mr Marcin Romanowski are held accountable before the Polish justice system,” he said on social media.
Ziobro was the leader of the ultra-conservative Sovereign Poland party, a junior coalition partner of the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party. He is known as an architect of contentious judicial reforms, which sparked a standoff between Poland and the European Commission.
When asked by Republika about his potential extradition, Ziobro replied: “I am ready to appear before any court, and an American independent court is certainly an independent court.”
He said he was not afraid of the court. “If they want to initiate extradition proceedings, by all means,” he added, describing extradition cases in US courts “a demanding procedure”.