With Poland continuing to violate EU law in its courts, affirming the primacy of Polish law on EU law with a series of rulings made by the Polish Constitutional Court between July and October 2021, the European Commission moved to defer the member-country in front of the Court of Justice of the European Union.
According to the Commission, which pointed out that those rulings affect the autonomy, primacy, effectiveness, and the uniform application of the European Union law, the rulings by the Polish tribunal breached the principle – in violation of EU treaties -that says that EU law is above national law,
The EC also argues that those rulings effectively affected the judicial protection of Polish citizens, who are not fully protected under EU law before the court like other EU citizens.
Ever since the far-right, Eurosceptic party PiS took power in Poland in 2015, the Polish Constitutional Court has found itself at the center of the bloc’s concerns over the independence of the Polish judicial system.
The now-ruling PiS reformed the Constitutional Court, whose primary role is to check whether laws are compatible with the constitution, making the tribunal short of its role of being an independent and impartial entity with the changes in appointment procedures in 2015 and the selection of current president Julia Przyłębska in 2016, which, according to the EU, present irregularities.
Overall, the Polish government and the EU have been clashing over the rule of law for years.
In a move that Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki dismissed as being “politicized”, the EU executive first launched infringement proceedings against Poland in December 2021.
Within the current open procedure against Poland, the EU sent its view to the Polish authorities in July, but the Polish government rejected its arguments in September.
