The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights and Amnesty International Poland are appealing to the President

HFHR and AI appealed to the President of the Republic of Poland to hold a meeting in the Public Debate Forum. The groups want the meeting to be devoted to problems under Polish law that appeared in relation to the suspicions concerning the alleged CIA prisons in Polish territory.

Those suspicions revealed a number of potential and actual problems with the correct functioning of mechanisms which should have been in force in a contemporary democratic state. For that reason, the organisations emphasised that a discussion would be both extremely valuable and necessary concerning such issues as civil control over special services, public supervision over the cooperation between Poland and foreign special services and the need to undertake cooperation with international organisations, among other things.

In the organisations’ opinion, the undertaking of a debate concerning problems related to Poland’s alleged involvement in the CIA’s secret programme, organised under the “war on terror”, could result in the consideration of specific good practice proposals and the development of specific standards. This case shows that, most probably, the democratic mechanisms which control the functioning of a state apparatus in Poland and those which control the operations of special services did not work properly.