Date: 2025.10.25
As part of the Central European Professors’ Network project, coordinated by the Central European Academy, I participated in the conference “Patriotic Intellectuals for Europe”, which was organized on October 25, 2025 in Budapest. The organizer was the European Civil Cooperation Council. This conference was interdisciplinary in nature and covered number of issues. Its participants were distinguished representatives of various environments, including scientists, through high-level officials, social activists to politicians. The guests were honored by his presence, among others, the former President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, who made the inaugural speech. This speech gave a particularly high profile to this event.
My participation in the conference consisted of taking part in one of the discussion panels “Current State of Rule of Law in Poland”. By appearing in this part of the event, I had the opportunity to present my assessment of the issues discussed in a group of distinguished guests, such as Supreme Court judge, Prof. Dr Hab. Paweł Czubik and attorney Bartosz Lewandowski, known as a defense attorney in many famous court cases in Poland. The panel was led by historian and journalist – Rab Irén.
In my speech, I outlined a number of important problems related to the actions of the Polish state authorities after the 2023 elections. Various issues arose in my considerations, including threads that were directly related to the issues of the Central European Professors’ Network project. Specifically, I reffered to comments on the legal status of the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs of the Supreme Court and the way this body is perceived by the currently ruling political camp (strictly speaking, I mentioned the questioning of the legality of the Supreme Court by the Minister of Justice in the context of the resolution issued by that court on 27 September 2024 on the illegality of the appointment of the National Prosecutor). Explaining the controversies surrounding the indicated chamber, I presented the genesis of the current legislation in Poland regulating the mechanism for appointing judges (including judges of the Supreme Court) and at the same time mentioned its assessment in the light of the standards of European law, in particular the case law of European courts: the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. My argument concerned one of the liveliest disputes ongoing in Poland, which has attracted the interest of Polish public opinion to this day.
It should be mentioned here that the source of this dispute was the reform carried out by the authorities of the Republic of Poland under the Act on the Supreme Court of December 2017. The legal solutions adopted at that time were met with criticism from some Polish politicians and became the subject of a number of rulings by the above-mentioned European courts. The source of the problem was specifically the procedural mechanism for filling the composition of the body responsible for submitting nomination applications for appointment to the office of a judge – the National Council of the Judiciary. This body, in the part consisting of judges (the National Council of the Judiciary consists of fifteen judges, in addition to which it consists of persons serving ex officio: the First President of the Supreme Court, the Minister of Justice, a representative of the President of the Republic of Poland, two members of the Sejm and two members of the Senate), began to be shaped in the light of the new legislation by the first chamber of the national parliament, i.e. the Sejm, and not – as was the case under the previous legal regime – by the judicial community. Such a regulation was considered by some opinion-forming circles to be a manifestation of the politicisation of the National Council of the Judiciary and, at the same time, an element depriving newly appointed judges of the attribute of independence. This resulted in numerous court proceedings and, consequently, also cases before the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights. Some of the judgments issued in this matter later related i.e. to the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs. Specifically, it concerned the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union issued by the Grand Chamber on 21 December 2023 (case C-718), in which the Court declared the preliminary questions submitted by the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs inadmissible. The Court ruled that the questions asked by that Chamber did not originate from a body with the status of an independent and impartial court previously established by law. In addition, it also concerned the pilot judgment of the European Court of Human Rights of 23 November 2023 in the case Wałęsa v. Poland (application 50849/21). The Strasbourg Court ruled that the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs, which had examined the applicant’s extraordinary appeal, was not “an independent and impartial court established by law” and pointed to the shortcomings of the extraordinary appeal procedure. It is worth noting that none of these judgments questioned the status of judges of the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs. In their light, therefore, the persons appointed by the President to this body are judges within the meaning of both European law and the standards of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
