The European Parliament adopted on Thursday 16 September, by 502 votes to 149 with 36 abstentions, a new resolution on the deterioration of the rule of law and media freedom in Poland. The resolution, supported by the five main political forces in the European Parliament, calls on the government of Mateusz Morawiecki to stop its attacks on “the media and the EU’s legal order”.
The MEPs had discussed this the day before with the Vice-President for Values and Transparency, Věra Jourová, and the Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, who highlighted the list of their actions, the latest being the request to the EU Court of Justice to impose daily penalty payments on the issue of the disciplinary chamber of the Polish Supreme Court, which has not ceased its activities despite the Court’s judgments.
“Yet another resolution on Poland!” lamented Juan Fernando López Aguilar (S&D, Spain), the chairman of the European Parliament Committee on Civil Liberties, on 15 September, at the fact that the European Parliament was once again having to talk about a “further deterioration” of the situation. The Spaniard urged the Commission to act, notably through the tool of conditionality.
“The Commission seems to be changing its mind”, said German MEP Terry Reintke (Greens/EFA) after the Commission President announced that she would be sending the first letters to Member States on conditionality of funds. The Commission, she said, must understand that these struggles for the rule of law and equality “are not abstract struggles”, but respond to “very concrete concerns of citizens”.
As a reminder, the resolution expresses the European Parliament’s concern about the purchase of the Polska press group by a state-owned oil company or about the ‘Lex TVN’ law, which will endanger media pluralism.
On the primacy of European law, the text also calls on the Polish Prime Minister and the Prosecutor General to withdraw their motions, pending before the Constitutional Tribunal, to examine the constitutionality of parts of the EU treaties and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Link to the adopted text: https://bit.ly/3Ad109U (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)