The Polish Senate has started to debate amendments to the law on the structure of the common courts and the Supreme Court. Senator Bogdan Pęk introduced the amendments on behalf of the Law and Justice parliamentary club. He urged Senators to vote in favour of the bill, but the Senatorial committees oppose it and support rejecting the bill. The controversial amendments deal with disciplining judges for their political and criminal actions outside the courts, prompting the opposition to call them pejoratively muzzle laws.
”All the representatives, in particular from Germany and from France, and those were the countries referred to in the arguments by the Ministry of Justice, reported specifically that there was no case like that in those countries. In addition, the judges in those countries are being disciplined for gross violations of their immunity in terms of violations of the law. This is the fundamental wrong and in particular there is no disciplinary action if the verdict is being served according to the merits of the case”- says Gabriela Morawska-Stanecka, deputy speaker of the Senate, Left Alliance.
”In accordance with the European treaties all matters regarding the court system and the regulations about judges are reserved to the jurisdiction of the member states themselves. In the EU treaty there is no such thing as one uniform European model of the judicial system. Because we do not have such a model, there is flexibility in the details of forming the judiciary according to the local will of the voters of each member country. And this is the spirit of that proposed bill. In fact this is the spirit of the previous bills on judicial reform voted on during the previous term of the parliament. We have an indispensable right to have our Polish model of the judiciary, we have a right to our Polish disciplinary accountability for the judges”- says Marek Pęk, Law and Justice senator.