More than 57 percent of Poles do not trust the courts, while only 2.3 percent of respondents said they “definitely trust” them. This is a record low. Trust in the judiciary has dropped significantly over the past year. “I think that by the end of Minister [Żurek]’s term it will already be 67 percent [distrust in the courts]. The sad thing in all of this is that it was the judges themselves who caused this in the name of defending their own particular interests,” said the president of the Sędziowie RP Association, Judge Zygmunt Drożdżejko.
More than half of Poles – about 57 percent – do not trust the courts. Confidence in the judiciary has fallen by 6.2 percentage points over the past year, while strong distrust has risen by 10 percentage points, according to an IBRiS survey for Rzeczpospolita. Only 36.1 percent of those surveyed said they trust the courts, and just 2.3 percent said they “definitely trust” them. This is a record-low figure.
“Stop focusing on themselves”
“Such negative opinions about the courts and judges in Poland have never been seen before… Judges must understand that they hold office in the service of citizens. And they must stop focusing on themselves and on questioning the status of their colleagues,” said attorney Bartosz Lewandowski.
He stressed that disputes within the judiciary deepen the image crisis.
“The average citizen really doesn’t care whether a judge was appointed by Lech Wałęsa, Bronisław Komorowski or Andrzej Duda. What matters most to him is that things are efficient, respectful, fair, and that the judge knows the case and considers the parties’ arguments,” Lewandowski added.
The return of the “caste” overshadows the good of the homeland
“We all know who is constantly undermining the status of judges, overturning verdicts and staging a ‘trial of the judge’ instead of dealing with the case. The false theory of the illegality of the KRS (National Council of the Judiciary) was created by the associations Iustitia and Themis, led by the current Minister of Justice, thereby anarchizing the state,” said Judge Kamila Borszowska-Moszowska.
She added that there are more than 1,000 vacancies in the courts. “As [Minister of Justice Waldemar Żurek] himself admitted, it is the citizens who suffer from this, but the return to the privileges of the ‘caste’ and the corporate model of the KRS blinds these circles to the good of our homeland,” the judge emphasized.
“I think that by the end of Minister [Żurek]’s term it will already be 67 percent [distrust in the courts]. The sad thing in all of this is that it was the judges themselves who caused this in the name of defending their own particular interests, acting against democratic solutions in the judiciary,” said the president of the Nationwide Association of Judges Sędziowie RP, Judge Zygmunt Drożdżejko.
Attorney Mikołaj Rusiński, in an extensive post, also pointed to the wide gap between the courts and society.
“I work every day with people who have only sporadic contact with the courts. And do you know what the biggest problem is? That they don’t understand what’s going on. It’s impossible to trust institutions that remain a mystery to us. This is a multi-layered problem of our judiciary. From incomprehensible legal language and astronomically long waiting times, through internal conflicts among judges, to the PO-PiS wars. Citizens get the impression that it’s not really about delivering justice, but some bigger game in which the person trying to resolve their case is basically irrelevant,” Rusiński wrote on social media.