The first reading of President Karol Nawrocki’s draft took place on Friday in the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament.
The bill would amend the law on the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) and the criminal code.
Zbigniew Bogucki, head of the Polish President's Office, said the bill was needed after a ruling by the Constitutional Tribunal, Poland’s constitutional court, narrowed the legal tools available to the IPN in dealing with crimes committed against Poles by Ukrainian nationalist formations during World War II.
“What happened in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia must be called by its name,” Bogucki told lawmakers. “We must not run away from the truth. It was genocide.”
The Volhynia massacres remain one of the most sensitive issues in Polish-Ukrainian relations. In 1943 and 1944, tens of thousands of Polish civilians were killed by Ukrainian nationalist units in Volhynia and eastern Galicia, then part of Poland’s eastern borderlands and now mostly in western Ukraine.
Bogucki said the bill would name the perpetrators as Ukrainian chauvinists and nationalists from the Bandera faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B), the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), and other organizations that collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Przemysław Czarnek, speaking for the conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, backed the proposal and said it concerned "the future as much as the past."
He argued that the ideology of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader whose legacy is deeply contested, should be treated as a form of totalitarianism.
Katarzyna Królak of the governing Civic Coalition (KO) said there was no lawmaker in her parliamentary group who denied that genocide had taken place in Volhynia.
She said Poland had a duty to protect historical truth, but warned against letting Polish-Ukrainian tensions serve Russian interests.
“Nazism and nationalism are wrong when practiced by any nation,” Królak said. She added that Poles and Ukrainians both needed to know the truth about what happened.
Anna Maria Żukowska, head of the Left parliamentary group, said Ukraine had never formally apologized to Poland or Polish citizens for the Volhynia massacre.
She said former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had apologized to the victims and their families, but added that there had never been an official apology to Poland using the language Warsaw considers necessary.
"Historical truth is important to us," Żukowska said.
She also criticized a separate part of the bill that would increase penalties for unlawful border crossings and for helping others cross the border illegally.
Żukowska called the provision an improperly attached measure, saying border offenses should be handled in a separate bill rather than added to legislation concerning historical memory.
Deputy Justice Minister Arkadiusz Myrcha said the proposed changes to the IPN law did not raise major controversy, but argued that such matters should preferably be discussed by historians, IPN experts, and researchers of Polish-Ukrainian relations.
Under the presidential proposal, publicly promoting the ideology of the OUN-B or UPA would be added to existing criminal provisions covering the promotion of totalitarian systems and incitement to hatred. The offense is punishable by up to three years in prison.
A motion was submitted during the debate to move directly to a second reading without sending the bill to committee.
Deputy Sejm Speaker Krzysztof Bosak of the far-right Confederation party said lawmakers would vote on that motion at the next sitting of the chamber.
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Source: IAR, PAP