President Komorowski on Monday: photo - PAP/Jacek Turczyk
“Personally, I can manage without such legal protection,” he said in an interview with the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.
“If you are in politics, you have to have a thick skin,” he said.
The president's comments come after Poland was criticised over the sentencing of Robert Frycz (right to anonymity waived by the defendant), creator of a the web site Antykomor.pl.
Dunja Mijatovic, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, stated last week that “in a modern democracy criminal sanctions for insulting heads of state are out of place.”
Frycz was sentenced to 15 months of community service for his actions.
His web site included computer games such as Komor Kiler' (Komor Killer), in which users can shoot at the president.
The law against insulting the head of state endures from the communist era.
As far as pardoning Frycz is concerned, the president stopped short of giving a clear answer, explaining that he did not want to interfere with the legal process.
“The author of the Antykomor.pl web site has publicly declared that he will appeal against the judgement, so it is far too early to talk about the issue of a possible pardon,” Komorowski claimed.
The president reiterated that neither he nor his office were connected with the initial arrest of Frycz last year by the ABW (Internal Security Agency), adding that he has never looked at the web site in question.
At the same time, he expressed his distaste for a computer game in which one can shoot the president, noting that it was “really not that long ago” that President Gabriel Narutowicz was gunned down in public,
Gabriel Narutowicz was Poland's first democratically elected president following the rebirth Poland after the First World War.
He was gunned down at an exhibition opening in Warsaw in December 1922 by artist and far-right fanatic Eligiusz Niewiadomski. (nh)