The dispute over Poland’s National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ) — the constitutional body that selects candidates for judicial office — has been raging since 2017, when the then-ruling majority transferred the election of the Council’s fifteen judicial members from the judges themselves to the Sejm, the lower house of Poland’s parliament. The European Commission intervened forcefully against that reform, as it was recounted for the European Centre for Law and Justice (ECLJ) in “The European Commission’s Attack on the Reform of the Justice System in Poland” and “The Reform of the Polish Judicial Council and the Independence of the Judiciary.” The coalition governing Poland since the end of 2023 has always maintained that the mode of electing the NCJ’s judicial members applied since 2018 is unconstitutional, even though Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal confirmed its constitutionality in 2019. Yet this year, that same coalition had new judicial members of the NCJ elected under exactly the same procedure, claiming that everything is now in order because the parliamentary vote was preceded by judicial “pre-elections.” However – far fewer judges took part in those “pre-elections” than the government has claimed — and that it was in fact the pro-government judges’ associations that picked the new NCJ members subsequently elected by the ruling coalition.

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Full text available at the Rule of Law Observer.