Polish PM says anti-defamation law was 'necessary shock'

Poland's anti-defamation law that strives to protect the country's good name in the context of WWII and Nazi German crimes was a "necessary shock" for the world to avoid such untrue expressions as "Polish death camps", Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said in parliament on Wednesday. Providing rationale for the amendment, Morawiecki said that the criminalising provisions had started to act in a "counter-productive" way. "The cornerstone of this law was, and has been, a single basic message: fight for the truth, fight for the truth of WWII and post-war times," the prime minister stressed, adding that the truth had often been "falsified". "This law, a kind of a shock, was indeed necessary. For this reason the whole world started to talk about it and we were able to achieve at least this: that no one in the world will speak with impunity about 'Polish death camps'," Morawiecki argued.