Poland's new government will adopt EU rights charter: official

(WARSAW) - Poland's incoming pro-business government will adopt the EU charter of fundamental rights, which Warsaw's ousted conservatives bitterly opposed during reform treaty talks, a top party official said Sunday.

"It will be a modernising government, and very actively involved in the EU. So it will change Poland's stance on the treaty and thus will adhere to the charter of fundamental rights," Jacek Saryusz-Wolski told AFP.

Saryusz-Wolski spoke after exit polls showed that his Civic Platform (PO) party had trounced the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) movement of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski.

Saryusz-Wolski is president of the European Parliament's foreign policy committee and PO's main spokesman on EU issues.

At an EU summit in Lisbon last Thursday and Friday, the Polish delegation led by Lech Kaczynski had stood firm on Warsaw's opposition to the European charter of fundamental rights.

Kaczynski had argued that deeply Catholic "Poland's point of view culturally is different from the majority of other European countries," notably in its stance on gay rights.

Warsaw's conservatives had nonetheless said they would adopt part of the charter related to workers' rights, in a nod to the role played by the Polish Solidarity trade union in bringing down communism in the 1980s.

PO's adoption of the full charter will leave Britain as the only member of the 27-nation EU to have opted out of the charter.