Belgium (Brussels Morning Newspaper) The lower house of the Polish parliament passed on Friday a judicial reform act aiming to satisfy the demands of the European Commission and enable Poland to access billions of euros currently frozen by Brussels in its row with Warsaw over the independence of the country’s judiciary.
The majority of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party lawmakers supported the changes proposed by the PiS-led government, while most of the opposition abstained from voting. Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki presented the proposal as a move aiming to end the ongoing feud with the Commission over the rule of law issues in Poland and, by extension, securing EU financing for Warsaw.
“For the PiS government, the financial security of Poles and the security of Poland’s borders are the most important things. And anything that strengthens this security is good,” wrote Morawiecki on his Facebook profile. “Therefore, we must end this unnecessary legal dispute in the West as soon as possible in order to focus on the military threat in the East.”
The European Commission has previously criticized Poland over its controversial disciplinary chamber for Supreme Court judges, which the EU believes jeopardizes judicial independence. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled in 2021 that Poland was in breach of rule of law provisions, and ordered Warsaw to pay a fine of one million euros for each day it keeps its disciplinary chamber running.
Some of this fine has already been collected from the funds Poland would otherwise have been eligible to receive from the EU, while the Commission also blocked Warsaw’s access to the coronavirus recovery and resilience fund, of which Poland was set to receive 35.4 billion euro.
The reform proposal replaces the disciplinary chamber, which opponents have claimed would have been overly influenced by politics, and would refer all disciplinary cases involving judges to the Supreme Administrative Court, a non-political body.
Despite the act passing through the lower chamber, its coming into effect might still be quite a long way away. As the opposition holds a slight majority in the Senate, it has announced it would add amendments to the act which PiS voted down in the lower chamber. The act would then return to the lower chamber, where PiS could again reject the amendments.
Once the law passes through both chambers, it still needs to be signed by President Andrzej Duda, who has already announced he would not accept any legislation that would “allow the legitimacy of judges to be called into question”.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reacted to the news from Poland by stressing that the EC would unfreeze the funds for Warsaw only after assessing whether the judicial changes have brought the country into compliance with EU laws, which can only be done once the new law is fully implemented in Poland.
