No trial against Jan Tomasz Gross

Polish-American historian Jan Tomasz Gross will not face trial in Poland for his book "Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz" about anti-Semitism in Poland after World War II. Grzegorz Pawelczyk welcomes the decision of the public prosecutor's office in Cracow to drop the charges of slandering the Polish nation and incitement of the people. "We will thus avoid a trial that - regardless of the outcome - would have compromised Poland in the eyes of the world. Bringing charges against [the authors of ] books or press articles is anyway absurd. All cases of this kind, other than those concerned with false information, violate a fundamental principle of democracy, namely, freedom of speech. A further problem in Poland is that many judges either do not understand what freedom of speech means or have no idea how a publishing house works."

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