A litigant in person who recorded her own employment tribunal hearing and posted the link on her Twitter account has avoided an immediate jail sentence.
Katarzyna Paczkowska posted the recordings and transcript of the hearing on her website and also tweeted links with the headline ‘Public hearing recording here!’
According to a judgment from November but published only this week, she was brought before the court by the solicitor general charged with contempt. Mr Justice Chamberlain found Paczkowska showed ‘deliberate defiance of the employment tribunal sustained over such a long period’ and it was clear to her at the time that posting the recording was prohibited.
But he decided that immediate custody was not warranted and imposed a sentence of three months’ imprisonment, suspended for a year.
The court heard that Paczkowska had been contacted by the president of the employment tribunal in 2021 after it emerged she had made unauthorised recordings of proceedings from 2018. The case itself was a claim for victimisation after her former employer had decided not to provide her with a reference because she had made a previous employment tribunal claim.
Paczkowska had been warned by the president to delete the recording and was referred to the attorney general’s office when she did not offer an adequate response.
The recordings were available online for download for three months and publicised on Paczkowska’s Twitter account.
At the contempt hearing, Paczkowska addressed the judge ‘at some length’ and argued that the proceedings had been initiated by her opponent. She argued that the absence of official recording of tribunal proceedings was ‘problematic’ and that judges should be prepared to reform the law.
Mr Justice Chamberlain accepted that Paczkowska initially made the recording because she genuinely considered herself to be at a disadvantage in proceedings as a litigant in person with English as her second language. Posting of the recordings was done because of a genuine sense that she had been wronged.
He declined to send her immediately to prison on the basis the recordings have been taken down, there was no evidence of intention to repeat the conduct, and there was evidence that Paczkowska suffered from anxiety.
