Jarosław Gowin
Jarosław Gowin was born on 4th December 1961. He is a Polish conservative politician and editor. Gowin served as Minister of Justice in the cabinet of Prime Minister Donald Tusk between 2011 to 2013.
Education and Political Career[edit]
Jarosław Gowin was born in Kraków to parents previously involved in the anti-communist Freedom and Independence movement, whose political discussions had an early affect on his upbringing. Later in life, Gowin was educated at Jagiellonian University and the University of Cambridge, where Gowin met and discussed Polish issues with the political scholar Zbigniew Pełczyński. Upon returning to Poland, Gowin also came into contact with professor and personal friend Józef Tischner, whose Catholic and political philosophy also highly influenced Gowin's views. Gowin later became the founder and rector of Tischner European University in Kraków. Between 1994 to 2005, Gowin acted as editor-in-chief of the conservative Catholic magazine 'Znak'.
Gowin was elected to the Senate in the 2005 parliamentary election as a candidate for Civic Platform representing Kraków. In the wake of Jan Rokita's decision not to run for another term in the Sejm, Gowin was chosen as Civic Platform's candidate for Kraków in the 2007 parliamentary election, winning a seat.
Following his party's successful re-election to government in the 2011 parliamentary election, Gowin was chosen by Prime Minister Donald Tusk to become the next Minister of Justice. In 2012 he resigned from his position and started his own party - 'Poland Together'.
Career as a Minister[edit]
Gowin was sworn in as a member of the cabinet on 18th November 2011. As minister, Gowin began a streamline program to remove bureaucratic hurdles from 49 professions in order to boost employment, including taxi drivers and tourist guides. Gowin's ministry also oversaw the criminal investigation on the collapse of investment firm Amber Gold and its subsidiary airline OLT Express in 2012. However, Gowin was criticized over his ministry's belated discovery of the firm's financial wrongdoings, as well as a legal loophole that allowed the firm to operate without a banking license. In October 2012, as part of his ministry's plans to reform the nation's judicial system and against the wishes of the Polish People's Party, the government's junior coalition partner, Gowin issued the elimination of 79 district courts, combining their functions with other regional courts in order to better utilize staff judges.
In reaction to the opposition Democratic Left Alliance's (SLD) pledge in November 2012 to ban far-right groups such as the National Radical Camp and the All-Polish Youth, Gowin stated his opposition to any move in an interview with TOK FM. While deploring both groups' nationalist rhetoric as "repulsive," Gowin stressed that both organizations did not exceed legal limits to issue a ban, as well as citing the absence of legal tools to issue such a decree. At the same time, Gowin affirmed his belief that rhetoric from far-left groups, including opinions from the journal Krytyka Polityczna, which Gowin singled out as a publication of "Leninist apologists," were more repulsive to his generation than rightist nationalists. "When I hear demands to censor the All-Polish Youth by SLD politicians and other parties, whose roots do not have anything to do with democracy, I think that these older gentlemen would do well to give pause," Gowin was quoted.
As minister, Gowin sought the European Court of Human Rights to recognize the 1940 Katyn massacre as a war crime and seek a proper investigation from Russian authorities over the event. During the case, Gowin stated that Russia still faced problems with the domestic rule of law in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse. Similarly, Gowin was deeply critical of the same court over its decision, while reviewing the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, to declassify papers regarding the CIA's alleged detention sites in Poland from the previous decade, saying the information's release constituted a security threat to Polish citizens, and reduced chances for Poland's cooperation with the European Court of Human Rights for the near future.
