Poland fined €500,000 per day for not complying with EU order to close coal mine

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ordered Poland to pay a daily fine of €500,000 (2.3 million zloty) for as long as it fails to comply with an order to cease operations at a coal mine. A Polish deputy minister, however, says that the EU “won’t get a single cent” from Warsaw.

Earlier this year, in an unprecedented case, Prague filed a complaint against Poland at the CJEU over the Turów brown coal mine near their shared border. It argued that the Polish authorities had extended the mine’s permit without properly examining the environmental consequences.

In May, the CJEU issued an interim measure requiring mining operations at Turów to cease. So far, however, Poland has not complied with the order, which its justice minister decried as “colonial”. Instead, Warsaw has engaged in negotiations with its Czech counterparts in an effort to resolve the issue.

The Polish government initially announced that a deal had been reached. But this was quickly denied by Prague, which in June said that it would ask the CJEU to impose daily fines of €5 million against Poland for failing to close the mine. In response, Warsaw applied for the interim order to be cancelled completely.

This afternoon, the CJEU announced that it had rejected Poland’s request and was ordering the country to pay the European Commission €500,000 for every day, from today, that it does not close down the mine.

“It is unequivocally clear…that Poland did not comply with the interim order,” announced the CJEU. “It therefore appears necessary to strengthen the effectiveness…[by] imposing a periodic penalty payment in order to deter that member state from delaying bringing its conduct into line.”

The court noted that “compliance is necessary in order to avoid serious and irreparable harm to the environment and human health”. It rejected Poland’s argument that closing the mine would interrupt heating and drinking water supplies in the area as “not sufficiently substantiated”.

Poland relies on coal for around 70% of its electricity, by far the highest proportion in the EU. In May, the Polish prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, noted that “4-7% of Poland’s electricity production is linked to the Turów mine” and “the safety, health and lives of millions of Polish citizens…depend on…its stable operation”.

In response to today’s order, Polish deputy justice minister Marcin Romanowski called it “judicial daylight robbery” and pledged to the EU that “you will not get a single cent”. Another deputy minister, Sebastian Kaleta, said that it was the largest daily fine in the history of the EU and an act of “aggression”.

Residents on the Czech side of the border, however, have said that the mine damages their water supplies. When issuing its interim measures, the CJEU said that it was “sufficiently likely” that continued mining “could threaten the drinking water supply…in Czech territory”.

The European Commission has supported Prague in bringing its case. Last December, it issued an opinion “in which it criticised Poland for several breaches of EU law”, noted the CJEU.

Main image credit: Tomasz Pietrzyk / Agencja Gazeta

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.