Arrested in Warsaw: 48 hours, then 24 more for the court

The people who read this at a Warsaw police station

Someone is sitting in a corridor in the centre of the city with a plastic bag holding a belt and a telephone, waiting to be told what comes next, and the only words they have understood in the last hour were their own name. That is the commonest reader of this page, and the reason the page exists: the gap between being held and understanding why is wider in Poland than almost anywhere an Italian is likely to travel, because the language gives nothing away.

Another reader is at home in Italy. A colleague or a partner has telephoned from Warsaw to say that someone was taken away at the airport, or outside a bar in the old quarter, or during a check on a lorry on the ring road, and that they will be brought before a court. The caller could not spell the name of the station.

And there are the people who live here. Warsaw has drawn Italian firms, plants, logistics operations and the staff who run them, so a good share of these matters involve someone with a flat, a contract and a tax number in Poland, for whom going home is not a solution to anything.

All of them need the same map: where the person is physically, who may visit, when a judge becomes involved, and in what language anything will be explained.

What a Polish holding does to the rest of your life

An employer in Italy notices absence before it notices anything else. For a posted worker, a technician sent to a site, or a driver on a route through Poland, the vehicle and the cargo are somebody's commercial problem from the same afternoon, and the company will act to protect itself long before it thinks about the person. A self-employed professional loses the week and the client with it.

Money becomes awkward in a particular way here. Poland uses its own currency, so cards, transfers and any sum carried in cash sit across an exchange that has to be explained whenever the amount matters. A relative sending funds discovers that the simple transfer they imagined involves accounts, identity checks and a facility that will only accept certain routes.

Housing and documents are the slower damage. A rented flat in the city keeps running up charges; a residence registration lapses when nobody attends to it; a driving licence tied to a vehicle matter becomes a question in Italy later, when it is renewed or when an insurer asks.

At home the strain is immediate and badly distributed. One relative takes on every telephone call, another is told nothing, children are given a version that has to be corrected later, and an elderly parent hears about it from a neighbour. Cold matters too: in winter a family arriving without plans finds a city that does not improvise easily.

Decisions while the court's turn is still coming

The choice that cannot wait is whether to answer questions or stay silent until a defender is present. The page above explains why silence is used here. In practice it is a trade: speaking may shorten the night and may also fix a version of events, written in Polish, which the person will later be asked to explain word by word. Staying silent costs patience and the discomfort of appearing unhelpful to officers who may suggest that cooperation ends the matter.

Next comes who stands beside the person at the court stage. A duty lawyer is available quickly and will meet the file in the corridor. A chosen lawyer needs to be instructed, needs the papers, and needs someone in Italy to act fast. The cost of the quick option is a defence that knows nothing about the person; the cost of the slower option is time that the clock here does not forgive.

The last of the real decisions belongs to the family: send someone now, or keep someone useful in Italy. Warsaw is reachable from Italian cities by direct flights, which makes travelling the obvious choice. But documents about employment, income, residence and family ties exist in Italy, and somebody has to be there to collect them while another person sits in a waiting room.

The file to assemble for a Warsaw matter

What persuades anyone here is documentary, because nobody in the room shares a language with the person they are deciding about. Paper speaks when speech is filtered through an interpreter.

• Everything already handed over. Each sheet given by the police or the court, photographed in full. These carry the reference by which the matter can be found, and the reference is the only thing that makes a telephone enquiry possible.
• Identity in both countries. Passport or identity card, the Polish registration document if the person has one, and the Italian tax code. Transcription of names is a frequent source of confusion and delay.
• The reason for being here. Employment contract, posting letter, transport order, the consignment documents for a driver, hotel or flat lease, and the name of someone who can confirm all of it.
• Ties worth proving. Family composition, children's school enrolment, a mortgage or lease in Italy, a stable address. These are the raw material for any argument about availability.
• Money with an explanation. Statements, transfers, payslips and exchange receipts covering the relevant period, since any sum found in cash will otherwise stand unexplained.
• Medical notes. Prescriptions and a short written description of treatment that cannot be interrupted, with the names of medicines as they are written on the box.
• Contact points in Italy. A relative reachable at any hour and an address where paper can physically arrive.

What to ask before the court hearing in Warsaw

Ask about mechanics. Nobody can tell you how this ends, and anyone who does is selling something.

• Where exactly is the person held, and will they be moved before the hearing?
• Has an interpreter been appointed, for which language, and will that interpreter also translate the written record the person is asked to sign?
• Who is the defender currently on the record, and can that be changed without losing a step in the procedure?
• What is the application to the court based on, and may we see it in writing rather than hear it summarised?
• What documents from Italy would be worth producing before the judge decides, and by what route can they arrive in time?
• If a measure is ordered, what is the route for challenging it, within what window, and who has to sign what?
• What can the family bring or send, what is refused at the door, and how are visits arranged?
• Has the consular channel been informed, and what does it actually do once it is?
• Is there any connected interest from Italy in this matter, and how would we find out?

Warsaw and Italy on one case

Poland belongs to the European Union, so cooperation between the two countries runs on judicial channels rather than through ministries and embassies. Requests move faster than families expect, in both directions. A matter opened in Italy can surface here at a passport desk; a matter opened here can reach an Italian address as a notification that arrives in an envelope nobody understands.

Language is the heavy cost of this pair. Polish is not transparent to an Italian speaker in any respect: not the vocabulary, not the structure, not the abbreviations on an official form. Everything substantial therefore passes through an interpreter at the hearing and through a translator on paper, and the translation of a document for use in Italy, or of an Italian document for use here, is a step that has to be commissioned rather than wished for. It is also the step people discover on the day it blocks them.

Practically, the countries are close. Direct flights connect Warsaw with the main Italian cities, so a relative can be here within a day, and the clocks differ by nothing worth planning around, which means a lawyer in Italy and an office here can speak inside the same working morning.

What has to be organised is the single account: one chronology, one bundle of documents, and two lawyers who have read the same pages before either speaks in a room.

How a Polish case is picked up from Italy

Engagement generally starts with a call from Italy, often from someone who has only part of the story. That conversation is used to separate what is known from what is assumed: the exact name as the Polish authorities wrote it, the place where the person is held, whether anything has been signed, whether an interpreter was present when it was, and what papers exist in a pocket or a bag.

Documents arrive as photographs, every page, nothing cropped, sent to one address so that a single file exists rather than several partial ones circulating in a family chat. Translations are commissioned afterwards and only for what has to be produced somewhere, because translating everything wastes the days that matter.

Acts before Polish authorities are carried out by a lawyer admitted in Poland. The work on the Italian side is the other half of the same matter: obtaining from Italian employers, banks, registries and schools the documents that prove who this person is and where they live, handling the Italian limb if one exists, keeping contact with the consular channel, and making sure the two defences describe identical facts.

Families are dealt with in Italian; correspondence with local counsel runs in English. The practice keeps rooms in Rome, Milan and Naples, and calls are scheduled around the hours when a court, a prison or a consular office answers.

Habits that cost people in Polish proceedings

The damage in these matters is usually done by people trying to help, in the hours when nobody has slept.

• Signing a Polish document because an officer nods. A signature on a record you cannot read is your account of the events, and it will be read aloud to you later in a room where it is too late to disown it.
• Accepting a translation from a bystander. A colleague, a hotel receptionist or a passer-by who speaks some Italian is not an interpreter, and their good-faith version becomes the official one.
• Explaining the company's business to officers. Where a firm is involved, an employee who starts describing contracts and invoices to be helpful is building a file nobody asked them to build.
• Wiping a phone or a laptop. Deletion is detectable and it changes the subject from what you did to what you hid.
• Telling the story in a group chat. Messages are forwarded, screenshotted and eventually produced, and the version written in the middle of the night is the one that survives.
• Paying anyone who promises a quick end. Money handed over informally creates a second matter and leaves no usable trace.
• Going quiet with relatives. Silence sends families to random offices, where they repeat guesses that later have to be unpicked one by one.

Reading the paperwork you are handed in Poland

The sheets given to a person held in Warsaw use a small set of recurring concepts. Recognising them is worth more than a loose translation of the whole page.

• Police detention. The holding that begins at the moment a person is actually deprived of liberty. It is not a decision about guilt and it is not pre-trial arrest; it is the window before a court is involved.
• Pre-trial arrest. The measure a court may order afterwards. It is a decision about whether a person stays available, not a conviction, and the distinction is the one families most often get wrong.
• The application. The written request that moves the matter from the police stage to the court stage. Asking to see it, rather than to be told about it, is always worth doing.
• Right to silence. The entitlement to refuse to answer. On a Polish form it appears among the rights read out at the start, and the page above explains why it carries particular weight here.
• Extradition and the European arrest warrant. The slower route used with states outside the Union, and the quicker one used inside it. Which word appears tells you which track the file is on.

When a word is not on this list, photograph the whole page: the sentence around it decides its meaning.