MAIN POINTs
1
On September 10, 2026, in Case P 10/24, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal held that Article 19(1) TEU, with Article 47 of the Charter and Article 267 TFEU, cannot empower the CJEU to assess Polish judicial appointments.
2
The case grew out of an ordinary contractual-penalty dispute that stalled after Judge Jacek Widło asked to be recused — one of over 260 such requests he has filed.
3
The Tribunal held that Poland never delegated to the EU any competence over the organization of its judiciary, so the CJEU acted beyond its conferred powers.
4
The judgment answers the CJEU’s March 24, 2026 ruling in Case C-521/21, which had urged Polish courts to disapply the Constitution and the Tribunal’s rulings.
5
Final and universally binding, the judgment means CJEU assessments of Polish appointments produce no legal effects in Poland; courts relying on them act without a legal basis.
On September 10, 2026, Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the second subparagraph of Article 19(1) of the Treaty on European Union, read together with Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Article 267 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, is incompatible with the Polish Constitution insofar as those provisions confer on the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) the power to assess Poland’s judicial appointment procedure and to hold that a bench including judges appointed by the President of Poland is not a court — and insofar as they are understood to bind Polish courts to such an assessment.
The question was referred by Poland’s Supreme Court in an ordinary dispute over a contractual penalty. Its real cause, however, was that one of the three judges assigned to the bench — Judge Jacek Widło — himself challenged his own status and asked to be recused, as he has done in more than 260 other cases, instead of honestly resigning from office.
The judgment is at the same time an answer to the CJEU’s ruling of March 24, 2026 in Case C-521/21, in which the Luxembourg court called on Polish courts to disapply the Polish Constitution and the judgments of the Constitutional Tribunal and to examine for themselves the circumstances in which other judges had been appointed.
For readers outside Poland, some background is in order. The dispute goes back to the 2017 reform of the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ), the constitutional body that vets candidates for judicial office and submits nominations to the President: the fifteen judicial members of the Council, previously chosen by judges themselves, were from then on elected by the Sejm, Poland’s lower house of parliament. The European Commission treated that change as a threat to judicial independence, triggering the Article 7 procedure in December 2017 and then bringing Poland before the CJEU — a sequence of events set out in Patryk Regalski’s chronology of the Commission’s campaign against the Polish judicial reform for the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ), whose substance he examined in a companion study on the reform of the Polish Judicial Council and the independence of the judiciary.
The underlying question — whether EU law prevails over national constitutions — is not a Polish peculiarity. As the Ordo Iuris Institute’s comparative study of case law in selected EU member states on constitutional supremacy over EU law shows, the constitutional courts of Germany, Italy, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Spain, France and Romania have each, in one form or another, reserved the last word to their own constitutions.
The Polish Supreme Court’s question of law concerning the status of a judge (ref. P 10/24) was heard by a five-judge panel, with Judge Stanisław Piotrowicz as rapporteur. It concerns a question that has for eight years been one of the main axes of the entire dispute over the Polish judiciary: whether the Court of Justice of the European Union may rule on who, in Poland, is a judge. The Constitutional Tribunal’s answer is once again unambiguously negative.
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Source of cover photo: iStock
