The Sejm, Poland’s lower house of parliament, has passed a law that will impose on this government—and every future Polish government—an absolute obligation to submit to the rulings of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While more than a thousand of the Court’s judgments still remain unimplemented by various European governments, Poland intends to submit unconditionally to every verdict of the Strasbourg judges—even the most controversial.

The government wants to limit its own sovereignty

If the law is signed by the President, Poland will quickly be forced to kill unborn children and to grant marital privileges to same-sex de facto unions; a future government will not be able to decide independently on Poland’s judicial system, and Islamic terrorists illegally crossing the Polish border will be shielded like refugees and cannot be deported.

I know this sounds shocking, but each of these scenarios is based on specific ECtHR rulings from recent years.

In recent years, the Strasbourg Court has ruled several times that Poland is obliged to make it possible to formalize same-sex unions, and has held that the legal protection of the life of children with disabilities in Poland violates the European Convention on Human Rights.

The ECtHR judges have opposed:

  • the Polish parliament’s constitutional freedom to select the members of the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ) and to regulate the organization of the Supreme Court,
  • the constitutional prerogative of the President of Poland to appoint judges,
  • the constitutional guarantees protecting human life at the prenatal stage of development,
  • the constitutional guarantees of the natural identity of marriage as a union of a woman and a man.

The ECtHR has repeatedly stood up for illegal migrants unlawfully crossing the EU’s borders. The Court has even called into question the very possibility of effectively defending the Polish border!

Had the law now passed by the Sejm been in force in 2021—during the hybrid aggression against the Polish border—then, instead of building a wall and effectively protecting the security of Poles, the government would have been forced to welcome thousands of aggressive newcomers from Africa and the Middle East. What is more, it would have been prohibited from setting up transit camps for them, and the newcomers would have been free to move around the country at will.

In 2021, the security of our borders could be ensured in defiance of the Strasbourg Court. Now the government and the Sejm want to force us to blindly implement every ruling of international judges.

The effects of such a policy are easy to predict.

The Court recently became notorious for a judgment in which it condemned Denmark for deporting an Iraqi drug trafficker. Why? According to the judges, protecting the safety of Danes… was a violation of the criminal’s right to respect for his private and family life. The mandatory implementation of such judgments means the end of independent national policy.

Time to mobilize!

More and more European states are opposing ECtHR rulings, deporting migrants whom the Strasbourg judges had defended. The governments of these states say plainly that ensuring the security of their citizens matters more to them than executing Strasbourg’s judgments.

The problem has already become serious enough that this year the representatives of all 46 member states of the Council of Europe unanimously adopted the so-called Chișinău Declaration, which called for abandoning the harmful interpretation of the law being pushed by the Court.

Meanwhile, the Polish government wants to… strip itself of the right to defend its citizens’ security and voluntarily deprive itself of the right to self-determination.

The aforementioned law on the obligation to enforce ECtHR rulings will soon be passed in the Senate.

A great mobilization of Polish patriots is needed to effectively appeal to President Karol Nawrocki for a presidential veto.

Lawyers at the Ordo Iuris Institute have prepared a critical analysis of the law, which was submitted to Poland’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of the public consultations. Now we must urgently prepare an analysis to deliver to the Chancellery of the President of Poland.

We have also launched an online petition with an appeal for a veto.

The European Parliament calls for blackmailing governments

The law on the obligation to enforce the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights is an especially peculiar attack on Polish sovereignty in that… we are carrying it out against ourselves.

But at the same time our independence is also under attack from the outside—especially by EU institutions.

Recently, our experts wrote about the European Parliament’s resolution and the European Commission’s report on the state of the rule of law in European countries. The MEPs are calling for more decisive financial blackmail of states that “fail to respect the rule of law.”

As Poles, we know all too well what these calls mean in practice. Recent years have shown us very clearly that the interpretation of the concept of “rule of law” within EU institutions depends on who holds power in Poland.

Exposing the hypocrisy and bias of the Eurocrats

The best proof of this is the recent report by the European Commission (EC) analyzing the state of the rule of law in the 27 EU member states and four candidate countries. EU officials write that Poland under Donald Tusk… has made “some further progress” in “restoring the rule of law” after years of Law and Justice (PiS) rule.

Our lawyers have prepared an analysis of the EU document, in which we highlight the bias of EC officials who perceive a “positive trajectory” of change in Poland despite the fact that, after nearly three years of Donald Tusk’s government, none of the key changes demanded by EU officials in every previous edition of the same report have been implemented.

In previous years, EC officials very firmly demanded, among other things, that the United Right government separate the offices of Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General. This year, the authors of the document state that in Poland “limited further progress has been made in implementing the recommendation to carry out a reform separating the functions of the Minister of Justice and the Prosecutor General.” In reality, however, under Donald Tusk’s government nothing has happened on this issue beyond announcements of change…

In our analysis of the EU report, we also reveal the behind-the-scenes story of how the document came about. The EU report was based on information provided by national authorities, comments submitted during targeted written consultations, and findings from so-called country visits. The annex to the chapter devoted to Poland lists the entities that the Commission’s services met with in February and March 2026 during a remotely conducted “country visit.” Among the organizations on that list were the Polish Judges’ Association “Iustitia,” the Stefan Batory Foundation, Human Rights Watch, and ILGA-Europe (the International Association of Gays and Lesbians). Not a single group critical of the government appears on the list of organizations that spoke with EC officials.

We know how to regain sovereignty

The rule-of-law report is just further proof that the European Union is in a gigantic crisis. Repeated unlawful usurpations of powers by the EU and the erosion of Polish sovereignty require an urgent response.

That is why our lawyers—in cooperation with Hungarian experts—have prepared the report “The Great Reset. The Urgent Need to Reform the European Union.” For the first time, supporters of national sovereignty have been given a concrete program for restoring democracy and sovereignty in Europe.

We delivered the report to Members of the European Parliament, to judges and advocates general of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), to European Union commissioners, and to the heads of government of EU states. In total, the report reached 567 decision-makers. We have already translated it into English, Hungarian, French, Spanish, and Italian. Presentations of the report have already taken place in most of the EU’s key capitals and in Washington.

We are now working on a draft law on the protection of sovereignty and the rule of law.

In this law, which will become part of the State Recovery Plan, we will propose a clear affirmation of the primacy of the Polish Constitution over EU law, the establishment of a mechanism to review the acts of EU bodies, and the creation of an Office for the Protection of the Sovereignty of the Republic of Poland as an institutional guardian of the limits of integration.

If the aforementioned law on the obligation to enforce the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights enters into force, we will also have to urgently prepare a law that reverses the effects of these harmful provisions…

Jerzy Kwaśniewski, attorney and President of the Ordo Iuris Institute

See also:

Source of cover photo: Ordo Iuris


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