Poland's membership of the EU was plunged into uncertainty on Wednesday after its judges defied a European court order to reverse some of its controversial judicial reforms.
Stanisław Piotrowicz, a senior Polish judge, said that interim measures by the EU’s highest court, which ordered Warsaw to suspend the reforms, were “not in line” with the Polish constitution.
The defiant ruling is the first of two verdicts due to be issued this week by Polish judges which appear to question a fundamental requirement of EU membership: that EU law takes precedence over national laws.
The ruling prompted Guy Verhofstadt, a prominent MEP and former chief Brexit coordinator, to warn that Poland’s eurosceptic government was trying to drag the country out of the bloc.
“Against the wishes of the vast majority of Polish people who want an EU future, the populist governing PiS [Law and Justice] party is determined to take Poland out of the EU,” he wrote on Twitter.
“Will anyone act to stop them before it is too late?” he added, and claimed that the rule of law in Poland was breaking down.
The Polish ruling came after the European Court of Justice [ECJ] issued an interim order for Warsaw to suspend its “disciplinary chamber” of the Supreme Court, which was part of measures to overhaul the Polish legal system.
Under the Polish reforms, which came into effect in February 2020, the disciplinary chamber has powers to strip judges of immunity and cut their salaries. The reforms also prevent judges from referring certain points of law to the ECJ.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, a right-wing populist and eurosceptic movement, has clashed with Brussels for years over the hugely contentious reforms.
Read the rest here. (paywall)
3 comments:
For an association that was supposed to be about trade, the EU do get pushy. After all, the UK had finally had enough.
“Against the wishes of the vast majority of Polish people who want an EU future ...” strikes me as a bit presumptuous for a foreigner to dare utter.
Poland has one of the highest approval ratings of the EU among EU member states. Of course, that doesn't necessarily put the Polish government and Polish people at odds, since the Polish government has given no indications that it wants to leave the EU.
The Polish court's ruling no more indicates impending Polexit than a German court one or two years ago ruling the same thing--that an EU law violated the German constitution and that the EU law was thus void--indicates an impending German departure from the EU.
It would be nice if the US States could tell the USG to back the you-know-what off from time to time.
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