‘For nearly two years, Donald Tusk’s left-liberal administration has been attempting to seize political control over the courts,’ Polish MP Marcin Romanowski for the right-wing PiS party wrote in a Facebook post last week.
However, what prompted that post was a positive development: the Constitutional Court of Poland had ruled that ‘the status of a judge derives exclusively from the constitutional act of appointment by the President,’ as MP Romanowski put it in his social media statement; and cannot later be challenged or limited by legislation or by other courts merely because some judges disapprove of how members of the National Council of the Judiciary are currently chosen.
The poster goes on to explain that the incumbent Prime Minister Tusk’s administration in Poland has been attempting to take control over the Polish courts by shortening the terms of court presidents, and then replacing the outgoing judges with party loyalists. They also got rid of the randomized case-assignment system so they can get sensitive cases in front of favourable judges.
‘Yet the government still faces a serious obstacle: roughly one-third of all Polish judges entered the profession or were promoted outside the control of the left-liberal judicial oligarchy that dominated the system until the conservative reforms of 2017. Under those reforms, the National Council of the Judiciary—the constitutional body that evaluates candidates and puts forward recommendations to the President—was removed from total corporate capture by judicial elites, many of whom were still rooted in the structures of the communist regime before 1989,’ MP Romanowski continues in his post.
He also likened Prime Minister Tusk’s desired leftist juristocracy to that in the United States, where many of President Trump’s executive actions were blocked by federal judges. This problem has been somewhat subdued by a decision of the US Supreme Court, which ruled against the legality of nationwide injunctions issued by District Court judges in June.
Similarly, the highest court has come down on the side of right-wing conservatives in Poland as well.
‘This dispute is therefore not about a “technical” provision, but about a fundamental question: who governs the state — the President and Parliament chosen in democratic elections, or an entrenched judicial corporation supported by unelected EU bureaucrats in Brussels and by equally unelected EU officials in Luxembourg, merely disguised in judicial robes to lend authority to a political agenda?’ MP Romanowski concludes his post.
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