Although Poles are not famous for a sense of irony, lately it has been on full display. A day after Poland's lower house passed legislation allowing courts to order chemical castration for sex offenders convicted of raping children under the age of 15, foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski protested at the arrest of Polish/French filmmaker Roman Polanski in Switzerland in connection with charges of unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl.
One of these events secured front-page treatment across Europe, but it was probably the wrong one. Polanski's case may have caught most of the attention, but Poland's move to force chemical castration on certain sex offenders may have much wider ramifications for Europe's legal and moral landscape.
Last September, when prime minister Donald Tusk insisted that Poland would have the strictest child molestation laws in Europe, few believed that he would follow through. In what seemed like a bout of momentary populism, the usually stoic Tusk held an emotional press conference days after the Polish press first began reporting on the case of "the beast of Grodzisk" or "the Polish Fritzl" – a 46-year-old man, known only as Krzysztof B, held in custody after his 21-year-old daughter contacted the police accusing him of raping her for six years and fathering her two children.
Facing pressure to respond, Tusk departed from his usual mild-mannered script, showing genuine anger. "I will say something which may sound horrible," he began tentatively, "but I would like to introduce chemical castration, not as a matter of choice but as part of the verdict."
He continued: "I know that such things are met with opposition by human rights advocates, but I will say something radical. I don't think you can call such individuals – such beasts – human beings. I don't think you can talk about human rights in such a case." Bombarded with the grisly details of the case, Poles took to Tusk's idea. In a poll conducted by the daily Dziennik days after the press conference, 84% agreed with the prime minster's stance.
The problem, as pointed out by a number of critics including Marek Safjan, who served as president of Poland's constitutional court between 1998 and 2006, is that mandatory chemical castration is not likely to be possible given Poland's own constitution and international treaty obligations. The legislation would have to overcome constitutional restrictions on involuntary commitment and an outright ban on corporal punishment, as well as European treaty obligations on bioethics and torture.
Both commentators and politicians predicted that the project would be abandoned, with opposition members from the nationalist Law and Justice party derisively referring to Tusk's chemical castration proposal as an unfulfilled promise. A comment by the new Law and Justice MEP Jacek Kurski captures the level of public debate: "Seventy per cent of people were convinced that they would cut off the balls of these deviants," Kurski told the daily Rzeczpospolita in May. "Yet months have passed, and what do they have to show for it? Show me even one castrated paedophile!"
Barring an unforeseen vote in Poland's upper chamber or an unexpected veto from President Lech Kaczyński, Kurski may get his wish sometime early next year. That is, unless a series of court challenges derails the project, finally giving voice to the very significant concerns with a mandatory castration programme.
Chemical castration is certainly not unique to Poland. In Europe, convicted child molesters in Denmark, Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland and Sweden are given the option of undergoing chemical treatments to reduce or eliminate their sex drive, and the Czech Republic has a controversial surgical castration programme that has been called "invasive, irreversible and mutilating" by the Council of Europe's Committee for the Prevention of Torture, but which the Czech government argues is effective in preventing recidivism.
In the case of Poland's mandatory castration legislation, there are two sets of relevant questions for Poles and Europeans to consider: one legal, and one moral. The legality of the matter is important, especially because the legislation will force Polish courts to decide what constitutes corporal punishment, whether the treatment can be considered mutilation or torture, and whether an expert body that answers to a criminal court can force individuals to modify their bodies in such a way.
Still, legality is not the only dimension. Gordon Brown's recent apology to Alan Turing for his chemical castration serves as a timely reminder that social norms and treatment methods do not always stand the test of time. Any form of compulsory treatment can turn into an ethical minefield, and this is no exception.
The relevant moral starting point is whether the Polish legislation is an example of an innovative, although extremely aggressive, rehabilitation strategy, or whether it is something darker, born not from the desire to rehabilitate but to punish offenders through disfigurement. Here, Tusk's initial statement and the general tone of the public debate in Poland suggest that the desire for revenge played a significant role in the legislation. It may be tempting to compare mandatory chemical castration to amputations under sharia law, because both represent mutilation as retribution – an idea that contradicts modern European practice and serves as a worrisome precedent for those who wish to subjugate individual rights for the supposed benefit of society.
Yet there is another way to interpret the legislation. Where mutilation implies punishment, modification implies treatment, and if one accepts that certain sex offenders are measurably ill (and not just depraved), mandatory chemical castration can be similar to parents being forced to take children to the hospital, or the involuntary commitment of psychiatric patients, both involving laws that are designed to compel treatment for the patient's own good, even against an individual's will.
This is not reason enough to accept (much less applaud) Poland's move, but it should be reason enough to consider the broader implications. Either Poland is, as Safjan cautions and as human rights campaigners would undoubtedly agree, on "an incredibly risky path, turning back the clock by at least an era", or it has unwittingly (and very clumsily) managed to force open debate on yet another bioethics frontier.