Following the change of government in Poland, parliament classified the restructuring of the country's judicial council by the previous government as unconstitutional. Three parliamentary resolutions from 2018, 2021 and 2022 on the election of judges as members of the National Judicial Council were approved “in flagrant violation of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland”, said a resolution adopted yesterday.
Due to the controversial judicial reforms of the national-conservative PiS government, which has now been replaced, Warsaw has been at loggerheads with Brussels for years. The European Commission has taken the country to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) several times and is still blocking pandemic aid worth billions. The pro-European government of Donald Tusk, which has been in power for a week, announced that it would reverse PiS's judicial reforms.
The dispute with Brussels also concerned, among other things, changing the composition of the State Judicial Council, whose function is to appoint judges. In 2018, PiS changed its original composition so that the majority of members were no longer appointed by other judges, but by parliament. The ECJ criticized that this gave rise to legitimate doubts about the independence of the State Judicial Council.