During the evening of Thursday 6 February, two days after the Polish President Andrzej Duda signed a controversial new law, Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, met Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki for a meeting where, in theory, they were due to discuss the forthcoming EU summit on the multiannual financial framework.
The law in question contains new provisions on the disciplinary regime for judges who are critical of reforms. In December, the Commission asked Polish legislators not to adopt the law before taking into account the opinions of external bodies.
Although Éric Mamer, Von der Leyen’s spokesperson, refused to say on Thursday whether the President would also be discussing the issue of the rule of law, the spokesperson for Věra Jourová, the Vice-President for Values and Transparency, discussed the Vice-President's trip to Poland last week.
Christian Wigand stated that Jourová had made it very clear to the Polish authorities that infringements and the Article 7 procedure would continue to be applied for as long as there continued to be abuses of the rule of law. The Vice-President and Zbigniew Ziobro, the Polish Minister of Justice, decided to set up another “technical” dialogue to solve the problems.
The Commission is currently examining the latest text adopted and signed by the President and “will take all appropriate measures, if required”. Three weeks ago, the Commission asked the Court of Justice to impose provisional suspension measures on Warsaw from initial disciplinary measures adopted in 2019.
On Thursday morning, several experts were invited by the Greens-EFA group in the European Parliament to discuss the rule of law in Poland and Hungary on the topic of 'Article 7'. One of the speakers, Laurent Pech, who is a professor of European law, stressed that, although the situation in Hungary is problematic in many respects, it is particularly serious in Poland, as this is a country “where judicial independence no longer exists”, setting an important precedent in the EU. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)