Polish NGO sues president over migration film comment

WARSAW: A Polish non-government organisation said on Sunday that it has filed a lawsuit against President Andrzej Duda over comments he made in 2023 about the film “Green Border”, which depicted the migrant crisis on the Belarus border.

The nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party, of which Duda is an ally, condemned the award-winning film by director Agnieszka Holland, saying its portrayal of the treatment of migrants at the border by Polish security services insulted people who were protecting their country. Duda said at the time that he was not surprised that critics of the film used the slogan “Only pigs sit in the cinema” to describe people who went to see it.

“We have filed a lawsuit against the President of the Republic of Poland Andrzej Duda for insulting citizens of his own country by calling them “pigs”,” the Racist and Xenophobic Behaviour Monitoring Centre said in a post on social media.

Malgorzata Paprocka, the head of Duda’s office, confirmed to Reuters by text message that there was such a case and said that the trial was scheduled for next year.

State news agency PAP quoted Paprocka as saying that the trial date was set for Oct 24, 2025 and that Duda would be represented in court by his attorney.

“Green Border” was shot in black and white and showed a family from Syria and a woman from Afghanistan thrown backwards and forwards across the border by guards indifferent to their suffering, as activists struggled to try to bring them to safety.

Migrants, largely from North Africa and the Middle East, started flocking to the border in 2021 after Belarus, a Russian ally, opened travel agencies in the Middle East offering an unofficial route into Europe, a move Brussels and Warsaw said was designed to create a crisis.