If Poland refuses to comply with the daily fines imposed by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the European Commission will take the money from the country’s EU funds. The Polish government has so far indicated that it is not willing to pay.
On Monday, the CJEU ordered Warsaw to pay the commission €500,000 for every day that it refuses to suspend activity at the Turów coal mine near the Czech border. Prague had applied for the fines to be imposed after Poland failed to comply with an earlier CJEU ruling to close the mine.
“If payment is not made (within the set deadline), and after allowing the member state to provide explanations, the financial penalty should be recovered by deducting from payments due to the member state in question,” said the European Commission’s press office, quoted by Interia.
The European Court of Justice has ordered Poland to pay a daily fine of €500,000 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 https://t.co/aIS0nIM59l pic.twitter.com/vbHvnNEnhH
— Notes from Poland 🇵🇱 (@notesfrompoland) September 20, 2021
However, the Polish news website notes that the commission did not make clear what date it understands to be the “deadline”. Nor did it clarify exactly which source of EU funds the money would be deducted from.
Earlier this week, European Commission spokesman Eric Mamer declared that Poland “has to pay” the fines because doing so is a “legal obligation”. He warned that, if it does not, “there are possibilities for the European Commission to take action”.
Poland’s government has, however, continued to insist that it currently intends neither to pay the fines nor to close down the mine. On Monday, a deputy justice minister, Marcin Romanowski, told the EU that it “will not get a single cent” from Warsaw.
Speaking this morning, Europe minister Konrad Szymański told RMF FM that “Poland is not paying any fines at this stage”. Instead, it would continue negotiations with the Czech government to find a compromise, he said.
In May, Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, claimed that an agreement to settle the dispute had been reached, but that was quickly denied by Prague. “The Czechs changed their minds and began to escalate the terms,” said Szymański today.
Separately, Poland’s defence minister, Mariusz Błaszczak, told Polskie Radio today that the “Polish government is taking all measures to defend the mine because it is important for our energy security”.
Morawiecki has previously noted that coal mined at Turów and burned in a nearby power plant provides 4-7% of Poland’s electricity. The government argues that shutting it down would endanger the wellbeing of millions of Poles, as well as threatening the livelihoods of thousands.
Błaszczak today also repeated Warsaw’s allegations that the EU is treating Poland unfairly. He noted that there are coal mines across the border from Turów in the Czech Republic and Germany that use “identical methods of extraction”. Yet “the EU only doesn’t like [our] mine and power plant”.
The minister argued that the real reason behind the dispute is that “Poland is developing and some of our partners don’t like it…We are under pressure to be energy buyers, not producers, as our rivals see us”.
Though Germany and the Czech Republic do host similar coal mines, the Czech and EU case against Turów is not over the fact that coal is mined there. Rather, Prague and the European Commission have argued that Poland extended the mine’s permit without following the necessary environmental procedures.
Main image credit: Kiefer/Flickr (under CC BY-SA 2.0)
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.
