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Commission and Polish government deadlock over court reforms

by editor

A Tuesday visit to Poland by Věra Jourová, the European Commission vice president in charge of values and transparency, failed to end the growing crisis between Brussels and Warsaw over Poland’s judicial reforms.

After meeting a series of Polish officials, judges and opposition politicians, Jourová told reporters that she “didn’t see anything as a concrete compromise” on the part of the country’s government.

The nationalist government was similarly unbending.

Zbigniew Ziobro, the justice minister who is one of the leading forces behind the radical restructuring of Poland’s judicial system, said at a press conference that there would be “no retreat” to the old model of appointing judges, stressing that the old system was “harmful and dysfunctional.”

The Polish government ended the previous system of new judges being appointed by a body controlled by the judiciary. Instead, the new system ties the appointments to parliament, controlled by the ruling Law and Justice party.

The Commission has repeatedly said that the new system doesn’t guarantee judicial independence from political pressure.

Poland’s Supreme Court ruled last week that judges appointed by the new body are illegitimate. The government has responded by passing a law that penalizes judges who undermine the judicial appointment system and who question the government’s legal reforms.

The Commission has asked the Court of Justice of the EU to freeze the new law.

The government defends itself from charges that it is undermining the rule of law by pointing to other EU countries where politicians have a role in choosing judges — although judicial experts from those countries say the comparisons are inaccurate.

Ziobro returned to that theme with Jourová, saying that Poland could pick the “German” model of appointing judges, which, according to the minister, is more politicized than the current system in Poland. “[In Germany] judges are appointed only by politicians,” he said.

Adding to the pressure from Europe against the Polish government, the parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe, a non-EU European human rights watchdog, on Tuesday passed a resolution criticizing the reforms and placed Poland under a “monitoring procedure.”

The parliamentarians said the judicial system was now “vulnerable to political interference and attempts to bring it under the political control of the executive, which challenges the very principles of a democratic state governed by the rule of law.”

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