CHR at the meeting of the Monitoring Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
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At the invitation of the Secretary of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, the Commissioner for Human Rights Marcin Wiącek took part in a hearing on the judicial reform process in Poland, which the Monitoring Committee organised during its meeting in Tirana on 2 December 2024. The discussions focused on the independence of the judiciary, the rule of law, and judicial reforms.
Poland was included in the monitoring procedure in 2020 as a result of actions that were identified as a threat to democracy. The PACE Monitoring Committee is responsible for overseeing the said procedure.
During his speech, Marcin Wiącek stated that the current situation related to the judiciary in Poland is very concerning and that citizens have lost confidence in the justice system. This is because they are not sure whether a verdict in their case has been issued by a legally acting court.
In addition to this, judgments that are correct and well-founded are sometimes challenged because they were delivered by judges appointed after 2018, i.e. after the amendment of the Act on the National Council of the Judiciary.
„This applies to 30 per cent of judges and several million court decisions. The legal chaos we are witnessing in Poland is unprecedented. Therefore, the most important task for the Polish parliament is to implement the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU. If this does not happen, the crisis of the rule of law in Poland will deepen”, said the CHR. He added that since the beginning of his tenure he had repeatedly appealed to the authorities to implement the rulings of the European courts.
CHR also spoke about the legal problems he currently sees in the functioning of the Constitutional Tribunal.
„The Constitutional Tribunal should consist of 15 judges elected by Parliament. Currently, the CT is composed of 12 judges and 3 judges who were appointed in violation of the Constitution. This has been confirmed by 2 judgments of the European Court of Human Rights”, he pointed out as one example.
The hearing was also attended by Minister of Justice Adam Bodnar, Vice-President of the Venice Commission Martin Kuijer, as well as Maciej Nowicki, chairman of the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, and Jacek Sokołowski from the Jagiellonian Club.
