The European Commissioner for Justice, Didier Reynders, will be in Warsaw on 18 and 19 November to try to hold talks with the Polish authorities and to find a solution with them, following the judgement of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal on 7 October which called into question the primacy of European law.
He made the announcement to members of the European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee’s Monitoring Group on Democracy, Fundamental Rights and the Rule of Law on 28 October, the day after the EU Court of Justice imposed a record fine on Warsaw over the lack of independence of the Polish judiciary (see EUROPE 12821/1).
The exchange focussed on the second annual report on the rule of law in the Member States, published on 20 July (see EUROPE 12766/2). A report that confirmed the Commission’s ongoing concerns about both Poland and Hungary.
On Thursday morning, Mr Reynders defended the exercise, which he said had enabled the first edition in 2020 to encourage real “reforms” in Member States and to start creating a “culture of the rule of law”.
Referring to Polish news, the Commissioner also returned to the concept of primacy, which was questioned by Polish MEP Patryk Jaki (ECR), in particular regarding Article 5 of the Treaty on the respect of subsidiarity.
“Nothing is being imposed” on Member States that have made the “choice to join the EU and share sovereignty”, the Commissioner replied, repeating that the decisions of the EU Court of Justice are binding and that it is “not the Commission that imposes them”.
However, the MEP responsible for the evaluation group, Sophie in 't Veld (Renew Europe, Netherlands), conceded that some decisions in other Member States were questionable - for example in France, where the government asked the Council of State this year to challenge an EU Court of Justice decision on mass surveillance, which it had accepted. While this case concerned a very specific section of European law, she said that such cases could also be discussed.
Researcher Laurent Pech, professor of European law at Middlesex University in London, stressed the particularly serious nature of the Polish case, which constitutes “a total disregard for the rules of EU membership”.
Commenting on the Commission’s annual report, on which he was commissioned by the European Parliament to prepare a study, Mr Pech also considered the Commission’s action to be insufficient and wished that the Commission would link the report more closely to its policy tools and issue very precise deadlines to Member States for changing problematic legislation. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)