Warsaw prosecutors have discontinued a nine-year investigation into former president and Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa over allegations that he gave false testimony about documents from the so-called “Kiszczak files”, concluding that the evidence did not provide a sufficiently reliable basis to prove that he lied.
The Warsaw Regional Prosecutor’s Office announced on 24 September that it had discontinued proceedings against Wałęsa, who had been suspected of an offence under Article 233 §1 of Poland’s Criminal Code concerning false testimony.
The investigation had been running since 2017. It was initially conducted by the Institute of National Remembrance’s prosecutorial branch and was transferred to the Warsaw Regional Prosecutor’s Office in 2023.
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An indictment was filed on 29 November 2023, but the Warsaw-Śródmieście District Court returned the case to prosecutors on 24 June 2024 and ordered further investigation.
Case concerned Wałęsa’s 2016 testimony
The proceedings centred on testimony Wałęsa gave as a witness on 13 April 2016 during an investigation into the authenticity of documents found at the home of the widow of communist-era interior minister Gen. Czesław Kiszczak.
The documents came from files relating to a communist security-service informant using the pseudonym “Bolek”.
During the interview, Wałęsa was shown handwritten documents bearing the signatures “Bolek” or “Lech Wałęsa”. Apart from one document, he denied that he had written or signed the material shown to him.
Investigators later relied on an opinion by handwriting experts from the Jan Sehn Institute of Forensic Research in Kraków, which concluded that a significant majority of the disputed documents and “Bolek” signatures had been written by Wałęsa.
That expert opinion became the basis for the false-testimony allegation.
Prosecutor challenges handwriting evidence
In discontinuing the case, the prosecutor who most recently handled it reached a different assessment of the evidential value of the handwriting analysis.
The prosecutor said the experts’ conclusions were not categorical because they had compared the disputed documents with material supplied to them as Wałęsa’s handwriting without being able independently to confirm that all of that comparison material had actually been written by him.
According to the prosecution statement, the experts were not given controlled handwriting samples produced by Wałęsa in the presence of investigators.
The prosecutor also identified methodological problems with the age and type of the comparison material. Many of the disputed documents dated from the early 1970s, while much of the comparison material came from substantially later periods.
Attempts to obtain additional, indisputably authentic handwriting samples from Wałęsa dating from the 1970s were unsuccessful.
The prosecutor therefore concluded that there was no sufficiently certain basis for finding that Wałęsa was the author of the documents in question and, consequently, no evidence strong enough to establish that he had lied when denying authorship in 2016.
Doubts about the files themselves
The prosecution statement also pointed to doubts about the provenance and physical history of the files recovered from Kiszczak’s home.
It said witnesses who had encountered the original security-service files in the 1970s and 1980s described them differently from the material later found at Kiszczak’s residence, including differences in the number and type of pages, binding methods and archival markings.
The prosecutor also noted evidence that communist security officers had forged Wałęsa’s signature and handwriting during the 1980s in attempts to discredit him.
Those points formed part of the prosecutor’s assessment of whether the material could safely be used to prove false testimony in a criminal case.
They should not be read as a final judicial ruling resolving every historical dispute over Wałęsa’s alleged contacts with the communist security service.
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Right against self-incrimination also cited
The prosecutor gave a second, independent reason for discontinuing the proceedings.
She accepted the defence argument that Wałęsa’s answers during the 2016 witness interview were protected by the right to defend himself against potential criminal liability.
The prosecution cited Supreme Court case law under which a witness cannot be required to incriminate himself in relation to another possible offence.
The prosecutor concluded that even if any of Wałęsa’s 2016 answers had been untrue, charging him with false testimony in those circumstances would have been impermissible because admitting authorship of the documents could have exposed him to potential criminal consequences over earlier statements he had made in other proceedings.
The discontinuance order is to be served on Wałęsa and his three defence lawyers.
A dispute tied to Wałęsa’s historical legacy
Wałęsa remains one of the most internationally recognised figures in modern Polish history.
He led the Solidarity movement that challenged communist rule, received the 1983 Nobel Peace Prize for his non-violent struggle for free trade unions and human rights, and was elected president of Poland in 1990.
At the same time, allegations surrounding the codename “Bolek” and communist-era security-service files have remained a recurring and politically contentious part of debate over his historical record.
The decision announced on 24 September concerns the narrower criminal question of whether prosecutors could prove that Wałęsa committed the offence of false testimony during the 2016 interview.
The Warsaw prosecutor’s conclusion is that they could not.
