Poland’s new prime minister has laid out why judicial reforms the European Union has denounced as an “attack on the rule of law” are necessary to reform a corrupt judiciary shaped by the old Communist regime.
Mateusz Morawiecki, who has taken over from Beata Szydło as Prime Minister of Poland following a reshuffle within the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS), made the case for the reforms in an article for the Washington Examiner.
“All year, we have struggled with the widespread misunderstanding of our plans to reform Poland’s deeply flawed judicial structure,” he began, citing the European Parliament’s attempts to initiate “never-before-invoked” proceedings to sanction his country because of them — although many in Central Europe suspect this move has more to do with Poland’s opposition to the EU’s migrant quota policy than the reforms themselves.
European Union Waging ‘Policy of Harassment’ Against Conservative Poland https://t.co/Iu4TeERdba
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) August 15, 2017
“No democratic nation can long accept having any branch of government independent of checks, balances, and public accountability. That is the judiciary’s status in today’s Poland,” Morawiecki explained.
“In the 1989 Roundtable Talks between Poland’s Communists and the democratic opposition, then-president General Wojciech Jaruzelski – the man who ran Poland’s martial law government for the Soviets – was allowed to nominate an entirely new bench of Communist-era judges to staff the post-communist courts. These judges dominated our judiciary for the next quarter century. Some remain in place.