Less than 9% of Poles think judicial reforms have improved courts

Less than 9% of people in Poland believe that the country’s courts function better now than they did before the current government came to power in 2015, while over half think they have got worse, a new poll has found.

It follows a number of other surveys showing dissatisfaction among the public with the government’s radical overhaul of the judiciary, which has brought Poland into conflict with the European Union over the rule of law.

In the latest survey, conducted by SW Research for the Rzeczpospolita daily, respondents were asked: “In your opinion, do courts in Poland function better today than before 2015?”

Just over half (52.8%) said that they do not while only 8.6% said that they do. A further 18% said that they function at the same level now as before while 20.6% said they did not have an opinion.

The view that courts function worse now than before was most strongly held by older respondents, by those with higher education, and by those living in cities, notes Małgorzata Bodzon of SW Research.

Another poll by the same agency for Rzeczpospolita in May last year similarly found that 53.6% negatively assessed the government’s judicial reforms while only 14.2% viewed them positively.

In December 2021, polling by IBRiS found that 71.9% thought the judicial reforms had not improved the speed at which courts work, 69.3% that they had not increased trust in the justice system, while 56.7% that they had subordinated the justice system to the government.

Likewise, in March 2020, research by Ipsos found that 55% of Poles regarded the government’s judicial policies as “an unacceptable attempt to violate the rule of law and give politicians control over the judiciary”.

Last month, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki admitted in an interview with Sieci that “the judiciary has been brought to a state of semi-collapse” and that there “probably could not be greater chaos and problems than we currently have in the judiciary”.

Those remarks were widely interpreted as criticism of justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro, who has overseen the overhaul of the judiciary since 2015.

Ziobro, who leads a hardline junior party in Poland’s ruling coalition, has increasingly clashed with Morawiecki over the prime minister’s willingness to roll back some judicial policies in order to meet EU demands and unlock billions of euros in funds frozen over rule-of-law concerns.

When introducing its judicial policies, the government argued that they were necessary to improve the functioning of the courts, to end prevent the judiciary from functioning as a self-contained and unaccountable “caste”, and to remove “post-communist” judges.

However, various evidence has shown that courts in fact function more slowly now than before. Meanwhile, a number of rulings by Polish and European courts have found many of the government’s changes to have violated the law and the constitution.

As a result, the judicial system has been thrown into chaos, with some judges not recognising the legitimacy of others and the rulings of entire institutions – including the constitutional court – questioned by many.

Main image credit: Sakuto/Flickr (under CC BY-NC 2.0)

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.