Strasbourg, 08/07/2016 (Agence Europe) - On Friday 8 July, Human Rights Commissioner at the Council of Europe (CoE) Nils Muiznieks said the draft law on Poland's constitutional court that was passed on 7 July by the Polish parliament goes in the opposite direction from the rule of law.
Referring to his recent report on Poland in which he expressed concern at the paralysis of the country's constitutional court and the negative impact of this on human rights, Nils Muiznieks asked the Polish senate to prevent a bad draft law from becoming a law.
CoE secretary general Thorbjorn Jagland announced that he would be asking the CoE's Venice Commission to rapidly examine whether the law adopted on Thursday complies with the said Commission's opinion published in March 2016 (EUROPE 11510). He urged the senate and the Polish parliament to take account of the Commission's conclusions when making the final examination of the controversial draft legislation.
In its current state, the draft Polish law abandons the idea of increasing the number of judges required to make a decision, a controversial issue on which the Polish authorities did a U-Turn under pressure from the United States before the NATO Summit in Warsaw. But it has kept a proposal which would force the constitutional court's president to appoint judges nominated by the PiS, the ruling conservative party.
Like the CoE's Human Rights Commissioner, the Polish opposition sees this as a serious threat to the rule of law.
A spokesperson said the European Commission, which opened a monitoring procedure in early June along with publication of an opinion on the rule of law in Poland (EUROPE 11563), was monitoring the situation very closely and hoped to pursue the current dialogue. The spokesperson added that the Commission was awaiting the final version of the law before expressing its views. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)