Fico was accompanied during his visit to the ministry by MP Tibor Gašpar, the former Slovak police chief, who remains charged with organized crime and corruption as part of a police investigation called “Purgatory”.
Justice Juraj Kliment, who heads the three-member Supreme Court panel criticized by Fico, condemned the prime minister’s remarks as a “direct and completely unfounded attack on the independence of the judiciary”, and called on the judges to the whole country to stand up. such threats.
The political opposition also objected to Fico’s comments, with former Justice Minister Mária Kolíková saying that “the Ministry of Justice has become the ministry of intimidation against inconvenient judges (and) the Ministry of Justice of the defense of criminally charged individuals close to Robert Fico”.
As POLITICO reported on March 20, since returning to power last October for a fourth term, Fico has dismayed Brussels with an apparent tilt toward the governing style of Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán, including abolishing an office key to the fight against corruption, by trying to subjugate the public media. , and repeating Moscow’s talking points.
Michal Vašečka, a political analyst at the Bratislava Policy Institute, accused Fico of “trying to create a mafia state… whose main goal is to keep the pyramid of power functioning.”
The day before Fico’s visit to the Ministry of Justice, the prime minister’s senior advisor, MP Erik Kaliňák, nephew of Defense Minister Robert Kaliňák, said he had asked the deputy director of the Slovak secret service, Pavol Gašpar — the son of indicted former police chief Tibor — to “conduct a thorough audit of the financial relationships of Slovak media, as well as the personal bank accounts of Slovak journalists, including those here.”
Politices
