The European Parliament has voted to strip Grzegorz Braun, a Polish far-right MEP, of legal immunity so that he can face charges in his homeland for a variety of alleged crimes, including relating to an incident in which he attacked a Jewish religious celebration in the Polish parliament with a fire extinguisher.
Braun was last year stripped of immunity by Poland’s own parliament and charged by prosecutors. But he was subsequently elected to the European Parliament, granting him immunity once again.
Poland’s prosecutor general, Adam Bodnar, who also serves as justice minister, had requested that the European Parliament waive Braun’s immunity in relation to seven separate incidents that took place in 2022 and 2023.
“A parliamentary mandate may delay the moment of responsibility for one’s own actions, but it does not mean impunity,” wrote Bodnar on X ahead of the vote.
The most controversial and widely reported of the incidents happened in December 2023, when Braun used a fire extinguisher to put out Hanukkah candles lit during a ceremony in the Polish parliament involving Polish-Jewish leaders.
Braun, who has a long history of attacking minority groups and promoting conspiracy theories, then took to the parliamentary podium to declare that he was “restoring a state of normality by putting an end to acts of satanic, racist triumphalism, because that is the message of these [Hanukkah] holidays”.
The speaker of parliament expelled Braun from the chamber, gave him the highest possible fine, and reported his actions to prosecutors, who later charged him with insulting a religious group, a crime in Poland which carries a potential prison sentence.
Another of the incidents prosecutors have charged Braun in relation to was damaging property when he disrupted a lecture by a Polish-Jewish Holocaust scholar at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw.
