Rokita, Jan (politician)

Education and opposition

Ian Rokita graduated from the Law Faculty of the Jagiellonian University . In the 80s, he belonged to the Independent Union of Students , was also an activist of the opposition movement Freedom and Peace, organizations of an anti-communist and pacifist nature. After 1980, he joined the independent self-governing trade union Solidarity . He was chairman of the union at Jagiellonian University.

After the introduction of martial law , Jan Roquita was interned between January 23, 1982 and July 2, 1982. In May 1986, he was again arrested by the State Security Service (SB). During his arrest, fingerprints were seized by force and a number of other key illegal actions were committed against him. Rokita filed with the Supreme Court and won.

Political Activities from 1989-2001

Jan Roquita took part in the Round Table as a representative of one side of the Solidarity (opposition). In 1989, he was elected as a Member of Parliament of the X convocation (the so-called Contract Diet). He was a member as well as vice president of the Parliamentary Civic Club. He also chaired the parliamentary Special Committee to Investigate the Activities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which reviewed the archives of the former State Security Service (SB). Rokita was the author of the final report on the work of the committee, which is also called the "Rokita report."

In 1990, he was one of the founders of the Civil Movement of Democratic Action ^[3] , and then joined the Democratic Union, where he was a representative of his so-called right wing. In the same year, Jan Roquita was elected to the Sejm of the I (first) convocation. In the government of Gann Sukhotskoy held the post of Minister - Head of the Cabinet of Ministers. He was then engaged, among other things, in the planning of administrative reform.

After the fall of the government and early elections in 1993, Rokita became a member of the II (second) convocation, again, according to the list of the CP. Since 1994, he was part of the newly formed Freedom Union. In 1995, Jan Roquita became one of the co-authors of the 3/4 Initiative, which set itself the goal of preventing the victory of Alexander Kwasniewski in the presidential election in the same year. Openly opposed the support of the elections and Jacek Kuroон - the official candidate from the Freedom Union.

In January 1997, he left the Freedom Union, becoming one of the founders of a new group called the Conservative People’s Party, which joined the Solidarity Election Movement. As a candidate, in September this year, according to the list of the committee organized by Marian Kshaklevsky , Rokita was elected a member of parliament of the III (third) convocation. In parliament, he was chairman of the Administration and Internal Affairs Commission. Jan Rokita became one of the founders of the local government reform of Jerzy Buzk’s government. In 2000, he was elected chairman of the Conservative People’s Party, where he took the place of Miroslav Stichnya. Rokita opposed the candidacy of Marian Kshaklevsky in the 2000 presidential election.

Political Activities 2001-2005

After the creation of the Civil Platform , in January 2001, Rokita initially belonged to the opponents of the Conservative People’s Party joining it. He criticized the politicians who came from the IDS to the GP, but after a few months decided to join the GP himself.

In September 2001, Ian Rokita was elected to the fourth (fourth) term, gaining 20,251 votes in the Krakow district. In 2002, he ran for president of Krakow (mayor), but failed, lost to the candidate, who was supported by the SLD and PSL, Jack Maykhrowski and Jozef Lyassot from the Freedom Union. From the time of the First National Congress of the Civil Platform, in June 2003, until the end of the fourth term for the convocation of parliament in 2005, Rokita served as Chairman of the parliamentary faction of the Civil Platform. Again, he worked for the Administration and Internal Affairs Commission.

Some popularity was given to Jan Rokyte in the Committee on the investigation of the so-called Ryvin scandal. This was the First Commission of Inquiry, the sessions of which were broadcast live, which yielded results - popularity in the media. Since then, this commission has seen an increase in the popularity of Jan Rokita, which coincided with an increase in the popularity of the Civil Platform.

In September 2003, his parliamentary speech provoked many comments, in which Rokita called on the government of Leszek Miller to insistently insist on the decision-making system in the European Union , which was established in the Treaty with Nice . During the parliamentary debate, he used the phrase Nicea o muerte - Nice or death. In 2004, he gave Mikhalova Karnovsky and Piotr Zaremba an interview-river, which was published in the form of the book “The Alphabet of Rokita”.

Political Activities 2005-2007

In the parliamentary elections in September 2005, Rokita received 72,145 votes and won a deputy mandate for the sixth time in a row. On the election posters it was advertised as “Premier from Krakow” (after the defeat of the GP in the elections, this became part of the joke, because they started saying “instead of the Premier in the hat, we have the Premier with the hat”, which was also a hint of transferring the government to Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz ). Rokita was considered a supporter of the creation of a coalition government with Law and Justice in the V convocation parliament. The lines of the mandate of the deputy in the parliament expired on November 4, 2007, with the end of the activities of this convocation.

In October 2006, Prime Minister Yaroslav Kaczynski , after disclosing information from the so-called Lesyak cabinet, decided that at the time when Jan Roquita worked as head of the Prime Minister’s office, he should have known about the opposition’s observation rally because this was due to his authority. Speaking, later, in this matter before the court, Yaroslav Kaczynski, however, did not raise these charges. A year earlier, in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza , the PiS Chairman stated that, based on the materials of the case on the monitoring of the right-wing forces, “no charges can be brought against anyone from the Civil Platform” ^[4] .

In the 2006 local elections, the candidate Civic Platform for President in Krakow - Mr. Tomasz Schypinski scored 55,779 votes (22.88%) and took third place. He was outstripped by PiS candidate Ryszard Terletski with 63,860 votes (26.20%) and candidate for re-election Jacek Majrowski with 103,157 votes (42.31%). On November 18 of that year, a group of parliamentarians from Krakow (including Jan Rokita) decided to support Ryszard Terletski in the second round. Rokita himself, without the consent of the party leaders, for the election campaign of the candidate piS, spoke against the background of symbols of the GP. The party board in Krakow did not officially support any of the candidates.

On January 28, 2007, Jan Roquita publicly announced the achievements, led by him, of the so-called “Shadow Cabinet of the GP”. He did this without consulting with any of its members, or with the authority of the Civil Platform ^{[5] [6]} .

On July 13, 2007, Ian Rokita was convicted in the first instance in a criminal trial to a fine of 5,000 zlotys for calling Grzegorz Viežežak “a very famous criminal” ^[7] .

On September 14 of the same year, in the broadcast of Hero of the Week on TVN24, he announced that he would not be a candidate in the early parliamentary elections and announced his withdrawal from active political life. The decision was motivated by the appointment of his wife, Nelly Rokita, to the post of presidential adviser to the President Lech Kaczynski for Women, which took place several hours earlier ^{[8] [9]} .

Post-2007 Activities

On December 10, 2007, in Warsaw , a district court ruled that Jan Rokita should apologize to the prosecutor and former police chief Konrad Kornatowski for describing him as “a very unholy prosecutor who dishonors the name of the Polish police” ^[10] .

In 2008, together with Rafal Dutkevich, Rafal Matiyiy and Kazimierz M. Uyazdovsky, he became one of the creators of the Internet portal Poland XXI. In the autumn of the same year, Jan Roquita became a political observer of the Polish daily newspaper "Diary" ^[11] .

In connection with the incident ^[12] of February 10, 2009, in a Lufthansa passenger plane, the prosecutor from the Landshut prosecutor's office in Germany , in a criminal proceeding, presented Jan Rokite with a statement of criminal offenses in the form of indignation and resistance from the police. ^[13] In August of the same year, a fine of € 3,000 was imposed on Rokitu. ^[14] Jan Rokita did not pay this amount, so the prosecutor in Germany received a warrant for his arrest for the execution of the sentence of replacement ^[15] .

• Cross of the Commander of the Order of the Renaissance of Poland (2008); ^[2]
• Kissel Prize (2003);
• "Man of the Year" of the Wprost weekly (2003);
• Medal “For Keeping the Word” (December 11, 2011) ^[16] .

The son of Thaddeus and Adele Roquit. The first wife of Jan Rokita (civil marriage) was Catherine Zimmerer, journalist and writer. The second wife (marriage in the church, in the Catholic rite) is Nelly Roquita (member of the sixth parliament from Law and Justice), a German woman who was brought up in Kyrgyzstan , who has a daughter from her first marriage.