Twenty-eight years after Poland led eastern Europe’s break with communism and its embrace of western-style democracy, the country’s human rights commissioner is sounding the alarm with a warning that the European Union’s largest eastern nation is on a road that leads back to authoritarian rule.
The latest plan by President Andrzej Duda and the ruling party to revamp the Supreme Court and a powerful judicial body would remove the last safety mechanism protecting the rule of law in Poland, said Adam Bodnar, elected in 2015 by the previous parliament as the country’s ombudsman. His voice adds to EU and U.S. concerns over a two-year effort to subdue the judiciary, just as the drive enters what could be the final stage.
“These are the last fuses,” Bodnar said in an interview in his Warsaw office. If the planned overhaul is implemented, it will dismantle “the safety valves protecting human rights,” he said.
The power grab by Poland’s right-wing populists since they gained power in 2015 has soured relations with Germany and France, while risking unprecedented EU sanctions against a member state for backsliding on democratic standards. Duda and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of the ruling Law & Justice party, met on Friday to iron out differences regarding the way politicians should increase their sway over the Supreme Court and the Judicial Council, which decides judicial promotions.
“The legislative process won’t be easy and may easily trigger protests,” Bodnar said. “We’re in a transition stage as we don’t know the details of what’s in this legislation.”
As Duda looks to hammer out a compromise with Kaczynski, Bodnar warned that even his watered-down drafts took aim at judicial independence and would weaken Poland’s democracy. The differences between the two sides are less important than the main thrust of both versions of the overhaul, he said.
“Sadly, we’re not talking about the faulty constitutional basis of the President’s proposals but about details regarding which politicians will get to pick which judges,” said Bodnar, a lawyer who runs the Polish state bureau tasked with defending human rights. “This shows the shift in the public debate.”
Since 2015, Duda has refused to swear in three Constitutional Court justices legally selected by the previous parliament, where his political opponents had a majority, instead opting to pack it with Law & Justice’s appointees. Meanwhile, the government ignored court rulings it didn’t agree with, saying they were “mere opinions” of some justices.
Wary of further street protests, the government last month unveiled a public-relations offensive promoting the court revamp and vilifying judges as a “privileged caste.” A billboard campaign paid by state-controlled companies splashed reports of judges caught shoplifting or starting bar fights, asking if Poles want to keep the status quo.
“We want deep justice-system changes because that’s what Poles want,” Prime Minister Beata Szydlo told reporters when the ad campaign started. “Attempts to discredit the Polish government via allegations that the rule of law is being broken here are lies.” Law & Justice spokeswoman Beata Mazurek didn’t answer repeated calls on Friday asking for further comment.
bloomberg.com
