The new disciplinary law for judges introduced in Poland violates EU law after a decision by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The disciplinary body located at the Polish Supreme Court does not meet all requirements for the impartiality and independence of judges, the ECJ said on Thursday in Luxembourg. Poland established the chamber responsible for disciplinary matters against judges in 2017.
It is at the heart of the controversial reforms of the Polish judicial system of the national-conservative PiS government. The disciplinary body can dismiss any judge or prosecutor. Critics of this facility fear that it could serve to reprimand judges for insubordinate decisions. The members of the Disciplinary Chamber are selected by the State Judicial Council; this is actually supposed to guarantee the independence of the judges. In the past, judges elected by other judges had a majority in it. But since the PiS judicial reform at the end of 2017, the members of the body have been elected by the Sejm, one of the two chambers of the Polish National Assembly.
The ECJ criticized the State Judicial Council as an organ that “has been substantially reorganized by the Polish executive and legislative branches” and that there are justified doubts about its independence. The judges deduce from this that the disciplinary body consisting of new judges may also not be sufficiently independent.
The starting point for Thursday’s decision was infringement proceedings initiated by the EU Commission. She has been taking action against Poland for a long time because she sees fundamental principles of the rule of law being violated there, and sued the Polish judicial laws at the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in order to prohibit the activities of the disciplinary body, which was newly established in 2017, and to annul its previous decisions. The commission also complained, among other things, of the Chamber’s lack of independence and impartiality towards judges of the Supreme Court.
Poland’s judiciary, for its part, is confronting the European Union. The Constitutional Court in Warsaw ruled on Wednesday that the country was not obliged to follow orders from the European Court of Justice with which it wanted to correct the dismantling of the rule of law in Poland.