Polish President Andrei Duda announced today the drafting of a law providing for the abolition of the “disciplinary body” of the Supreme Court introduced by the Polish government as part of a major judicial reform that has brought Warsaw into conflict with the European Union.
At the same time, Poland was today again convicted by the Court of Justice of the European Union of appointing judges to the Supreme Court, which is considered to violate the independence and impartiality of the judiciary.
In an official statement, Andrei Duda said he was proposing the abolition of the disciplinary body, expressing the hope that this change, which would have to be approved by parliament, would put an end to the controversy with Brussels.
Under the bill, judges appointed to the disciplinary body of the Supreme Court will have the option of electing another panel of the Court or retiring.
The disciplinary body will be replaced by a new body called the “Professional Responsibility Body” and will consist of 11 judges.
“I want to give the Polish government a tool to put an end to the controversy with the European Commission,” he said.
But it was not long before the first criticisms were made of Andrei Duda’s proposal.
“This bill is nothing more than an attempt to extort money from the European Union through a fake name change, continuing to violate the rulings of the European Court of Justice,” Laurent Pech, a professor of European law at Britain’s Middlesex University, said on Twitter.
In October, the Court imposed a daily fine of one million euros on Poland for ignoring a decision to abolish the disciplinary body of the Supreme Court.
Poland refused to pay the fine, and the European Commission wrote a letter to Warsaw last month asking for 70m euros to be paid in arrears from an October ruling.
The Commission has warned that if Poland refuses to pay the fine, the EU could begin to withhold it from European funds earmarked for Warsaw.
The establishment of the Supreme Court disciplinary body is part of the profound reform of the Polish judiciary which is considered by the European Union to be a violation of European democratic principles and an attack on the independence of the judiciary.
The populist ultra-conservative Polish government of the PiS Law and Justice Party explains that this reform was necessary to eliminate corruption in the Polish judiciary, which is a legacy of judges appointed by the communist regime.
New conviction
The Court of Justice of the European Union today convicted Poland of the process of appointing judges, which is influenced by the executive and the legislature, a fact that undermines its legitimacy, as the judges ruled.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has heard the lawsuit of Advance Pharma, which is in a legal dispute with the Polish state, seeking compensation for the withdrawal of a food supplement from the market in 2010, which was overturned by a court decision. The case went to the Supreme Court of Poland, which rejected the company’s appeal.
In its ruling today, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that the appointment of the judges of the Supreme Court’s case to Advance Pharma constituted a “fundamental irregularity which affected the whole procedure”.
Poland was sentenced to pay 15,000 euros to the company for non-pecuniary damage.
The Court of Justice of the European Union has recently convicted Poland three times in cases related to the judicial reform implemented in 2017. There are 93 lawsuits pending before the Court and the majority of them concern judicial reform.
Source: AMPE
Source: Capital
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