Poland's President Set To Sign Controversial Holocaust Law

Poland’s President Andrzej Duda announced Tuesday that he will sign a bill that makes it illegal to implicate the country in the war crimes of Nazi Germany.

Duda said he will send the law to Poland’s highest court for review to make sure its constitutional. There is no indication for a timeline on the law.

“We have the right to be judged according to facts and accordingly, as the President of the Polish Republic, I have taken the following decision. After analyzing the situation and the bill, I have decided that I will sign it. I am signing this bill and, accordingly, Article 55a will come into force,” said Duda in television statement Tuesday.

The law has received criticism from both Israel and the United States.

“We hope that within allotted time until the court's deliberations are concluded, we will manage to agree on changes and corrections,” said a spokesperson for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs to CNN. “Israel and Poland hold a joint responsibility to research and preserve the History of the Holocaust.”

The U.S. has indicated that the law could suppress free speech.

“The United States reaffirms that terms like “Polish death camps” are painful and misleading. Such historical inaccuracies affect Poland, our strong ally, and must be combatted in ways that protect fundamental freedoms. We believe that open debate, scholarship, and education are the best means of countering misleading speech,” said Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in a statement.

Part of the reasoning behind the law is to fight phrases like “Polish death camps.” Polish public broadcaster Radio Poland said that the phrase is often used in foreign media to refer to concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, that Nazi Germany built in occupied Poland during World War II. The phrase may suggest that Poland had set up the camps, and not Nazi Germany.

“There was no systemic participation by the Polish state, which did not exist, or by any Polish institutions in the German industry of death,” said Duda.

Historians maintain that some Polish individuals did participate in the Holocaust. Of the six million Jews killed during the holocaust, at least three million of them were Polish.

This story has been updated to include a statement from the Secretary of State.