Polish President to veto controversial Supreme Court bills amid protests
The President of Poland has said he will veto two contentious bills that are widely seen as assaults on the independence of the judicial system. The planned legal overhaul by the ruling party has sparked days of nationwide protests.
Andrzej Duda said he would veto two of three bills recently passed by politicians. One would have put the Supreme Court under the political control of the ruling party, giving the justice minister – who is also
prosecutor general – power to appoint judges.
Mr Duda said that the country’s justice system as it works now is in need of reform, but he said that the changes that lawmakers had proposed threaten to create an oppressive system and that the protests of recent days show that the changes would divide society. He said that there is no tradition in Poland for a prosecutor general to have such large powers and he would not agree to that now.
The President also said he was vetoing a bill changing the functioning of the National Council of the Judiciary. The change, among other things, would have given lawmakers the power to appoint judges, politicising the courts. However, he said he was going to sign a third bill that reorganises the functioning of local courts.
Mr Duda’s step won the praise of members of the political opposition who had been urging him to veto the bills, seen by many Poles and the European Union as attacks on the separation of powers in the young democracy. “What we had was not a reform, but appropriation of the courts,” said Katarzyna Lubnauer, head of the parliamentary caucus of the opposition party Nowoczesna. ”I congratulate all Poles, this is a great success, really,”
Polish currency the zloty immediately rose against the euro, as investors saw the decision as lowering the political risk in Poland.
Observers say Mr Duda’s decision puts him at odds with the de facto leader of the country, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who is the leader of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party but has no formal government post. Mr Duda was hand-picked by Mr Kaczynski as the party’s presidential candidate in 2015 and has loyally supported the party’s conservative nationalist agenda, not vetoing any of its laws until now. Since being elected in 2015, the party has tightened its control over courts and prosecutors, as well as state media, and introduced restrictions on public gatherings.
Mr Duda said he consulted many experts before making his decision, including lawyers, sociologists, politicians and even philosophers. He said the person who influenced him the most was Zofia Romaszewska, a leading anti-Communist dissident in the 1970s and 1980s.
He said Ms Romaszewska told him: “Mr President, I lived in a state where the prosecutors general had an unbelievably powerful position and could practically do everything. I would not like to go back to such a state.”