Poland will amend a controversial system for disciplining judges that has been at the centre of a legal dispute with the EU, the country’s de facto leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, said on Saturday.
The European Commission has given Poland until August 16 to set out how it will comply with a verdict by the European Court of Justice (ECJ), which ruled last month that the judicial disciplinary regime broke EU law. The commission warned Warsaw it could face fines if it failed to do so.
Kaczynski said that he did not recognise the ECJ’s verdict and that it went beyond what was allowed by the EU treaties. But he said that his conservative-nationalist coalition would “scrap the disciplinary chamber in the form in which it currently functions”.
The disciplinary chamber for judges is one of the judicial reforms the ruling party introduced in recent years which have been harshly condemned by Brussels for undermining judicial independence.
Kaczynski said that the project setting out the changes to the regime — which currently allows judges to be punished for the content of their verdicts — would be put forward in September.
“That will be a test as to whether the EU is ready to show at least a semblance of good will, or whether the rule is that Poland should be ruled by those who are picked by the EU institutions,” he said in an interview with the state-run news agency PAP.
However, he added that this did not mean that the chamber “will not function in any form”. “No one expects this from us, but it will be a completely different entity,” he said, claiming that the climbdown had nothing to do with the ECJ’s ruling.
The intervention by Kaczynski, who founded the ruling Law and Justice party and is widely regarded as Poland’s most powerful politician, comes amid a fierce debate in the coalition about how to respond to the ECJ’s verdict.
On Friday, Poland’s hawkish justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, who heads United Poland, one of Law and Justice’s two smaller coalition partners, insisted that Poland should not back down to the pressure from the EU, and accused the EU of blackmail.
“The ECJ says that Poles are not allowed to do what is OK for the Germans or the Dutch or the Spanish to do. That is a colonial mentality, which has nothing to do with the law,” he said in an interview with the Rzeczpospolita newspaper, adding that Poland should not remain in the EU “at any price”.
The fierce divisions over how to respond to the ECJ’s verdict are the latest in a series of disputes to roil the coalition, and have sparked questions about whether it will survive until the end of its term in 2023.
Asked whether his party would remain in the coalition if Poland made concessions to Brussels, Ziobro said that there was a “limit to compromise”.
“The basic definition of our interests and our position in the EU must be the rule that Poles cannot be treated worse than others,” he said. “If we agree to that in the area of the judiciary, then we will end up facing similar treatment in every other area.”