Minister of justice Zbigniew Ziobro appeared before the Senate yesterday to defend the amendments to the common courts’ bill currently being considered by the Senate. Ziobro said the changes proposed by the Law and Justice government are an expression of respect for the “democratic state of law” and addressed the issue of the Polish judiciary which had increasingly become “a state within a state”.
“It’s worth considering a different cause of the issues of Polish judiciary. It’s neither money nor procedures, but an overgrown corporation, which became like a so-called “state within a state”. It’s above any mechanism of democratic control. Without that control, it put its own corporatist goals above the society which it was supposed to serve. So I’m not only quoting my own diagnoses, let me refer to several quotes which are worth remembering. It’s worth stressing, that it’s not true, that the changes we are proposing, aimed at implementing such democratic mechanisms as balance of power and transparency in the appointing of judges, are an attack on the rule of law, an attack on the judiciary”- says Zbigniew Ziobro, Minister of Justice.