In Poland, an Assault on the Courts Provokes Outrage<br />Law and Justice, Prime Minister Beata Szydlo said, has “stood on the side of the people,<br />and nobody will make us turn back from this way — not even by shouting here and stamping your feet!”<br />To become law, a bill must have three readings in the Sejm, the lower house of Parliament, then be passed by the Senate and signed by the president.<br />“Collectively, they would abolish any remaining judicial independence and put the judiciary under full political control of the government.”<br />The drive to control the courts comes barely two weeks after President Trump paid a triumphant visit to Warsaw<br />and praised the populist and nationalist Law and Justice Party, which controls the government.<br />A second bill, introduced late last week, would force all current members of the Supreme Court to resign, including several who have been feuding with the government,<br />and replace them with judges selected by the governing party’s minister of justice.<br />“You could have been reformers of the Polish judiciary,” an enraged Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz, from<br />the opposition Peasants Party, said to stone-faced lawmakers from the Law and Justice Party.<br />One proposed law, already approved by Parliament and awaiting President Andrzej Duda’s signature, would reconfigure the National Council of the Judiciary, which chooses those eligible to become judges, so<br />that government-appointed members would essentially have veto power.<br />Since Law and Justice has only a slim majority in the Sejm, this would force the governing party to find at least one other party to vote with it.
