The Polish prime minister, Beata Szydło, has angered human rights campaigners by announcing plans for a new department of civil society to centralise state funding and “bring order to the whole sphere of NGOs”.

Too many non-governmental organisations were still “subordinate to the policies of the previous ruling system”, Szydło told reporters last week. She and other senior Polish ministers from the rightwing Law and Justice party were due in London on Monday for talks with the British government.

The move could allow the Polish government to put pressure on NGOs who have criticised ministers over human rights issues.

Activists accused ministers of grandstanding over attacks on Poles in Britain after the 23 June referendum to leave the European Union, while sabotaging efforts to respond to rising levels of hate crime at home.

“Public money is the main source of money for many NGOs, so it is easy for the government to realise its aims by putting financial pressure on them,” said Dorota Pudzianowska, of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

Krzysztof Śmiszek, of the Polish Society of Anti-Discrimination Law, said: “The previous government neglected us, but this one is openly hostile to the human rights agenda.”



Law and Justice has been accused of turning accepted notions of human rights upside down by portraying advocates of minority rights and anti-discrimination legislation as a threat to the rights and freedoms of Poland’s Catholic majority.

“Christianity is our culture, our civilisation, our basic values,” said the interior minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, after the terrorist attack in Nice in July, describing the atrocity as the “consequence of multicultural politics and political correctness”.

Wojciech Kaczmarczyk, appointed in January as government plenipotentiary for civil society and equal rights, has argued that the government has “had enough of militant atheists and enthusiasts of sexual revolution appropriating the principle of equality”.

Earlier this month, Poland’s interior ministry merged its human rights protection team, which worked with NGOs on hate crime and human rights issues, into a larger department dealing with European migration and anti-trafficking efforts.

In a statement, the interior ministry insisted the team’s staff would carry on with the same work as before, but a source close to the ministry told the Guardian it was “a clear attempt to weaken its role by removing its autonomy”. In May, the Polish government abolished the state council for combating racism despite a steep rise in the number of investigations launched by prosecutors into allegations of discrimination and hate crime; up from 60 in 2009 to 1,500 in 2015. Law and Justice argued that the council had been ineffective, but did not propose any alternative arrangements.

At the same time the government stopped funding Poland’s women’s rights centre, which provides support for victims of domestic abuse, arguing that it “offered help only to women”.

Kaczmarczyk, who has defended the right of business owners not to serve black customers if doing so would be “contrary to their conscience”, was recently transferred to the prime ministerial chancellery, where he is overseeing Szydło’s plans for the department of civil society. Conservative activists welcomed the proposals. “In the current model, certain social activities are overfunded and other types are neglected or ignored,” said Tymoteusz Zych, of Ordo Iuris, a hardline conservative advocacy group that drew up proposals for a blanket ban on abortion which sparked protests across Poland last month. Human rights advocates accused pro-government media of an orchestrated campaign to portray NGOs as acting against Polish interests. “NGOs are being framed as enemies of Poland because we take foreign money and criticise the government,” said Piotr Godzisz of Lambda, an NGO that monitors and records hate crimes against Poland’s LGBT community. Earlier this year, a brick was thrown through a window at Lambda’s Warsaw headquarters; a neo-Nazi symbol and a ”Ban the gays” slogan have also been carved into the front door of its offices. Campaigners fear the prime minister’s announcement could be a precursor to even more restrictive measures. “We are worried that Poland is going the way of Hungary or Russia, with NGOs having to register with the government as ‘foreign agents’,” Śmiszek said. “They are testing the water, and the more silent we remain, the braver they will be.”