Poland’s Supreme Court asks if Dutch court meets EU rule-of-law standards

Poland’s Supreme Court has issued a request to the Dutch judicial authorities for information allowing it to ascertain whether a Dutch court that ruled against a Polish firm meets EU standards of independence.

The request comes after a number of similar moves in recent years by foreign courts towards their Polish counterparts, whose independence has been questioned at home and abroad following a radical overhaul of the judiciary by the Law and Justice (PiS) government.

One legal scholar, Laurent Pech, has called the Supreme Court’s actions “trolling” and an “abuse of [EU] case law”. He notes that the judges issuing the request were nominated by a Polish judicial body that has been found by national and European courts to have been rendered illegitimate by PiS’s reforms.

The case in question relates to a Polish firm that sought to have a Polish court dismiss the enforcement of a November 2019 ruling by a Dutch court in the city of Roermond. The name of the firm and the nature of the case has not been revealed by the Supreme Court.

In July 2020, the district court in the Polish city of Poznań dismissed the firm’s case. That decision was upheld by the court of appeal in the same city in December 2020. The case was then brought to the Supreme Court

On 30 June this year, the civil chamber of the Supreme Court, reviewing the case, deemed it necessary “to determine whether the [Dutch] court that issued the ruling met the standards of independence” established under EU law as interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

To this end, the Supreme Court requested that the Dutch Council of the Judiciary provide copies of documents concerning the nomination procedure of the Dutch judge who ruled against the company.

These are to include “the mode of his appointment with an indication of the competent authorities involved in the nomination procedure”, “an indication of the extent, if any, of the influence of legislative or executive representatives on the judicial appointment”, and details of possible activities by the judge of a political nature.

At the same time, the Supreme Court asked the Polish justice minister for information on Dutch law about the guarantees of the independence of the judiciary there, including the influence of the legislature or the executive on the appointment of judges and the existence of constitutional guarantees regarding the status of a judge.

Those requests echo criticism levelled towards Poland’s judiciary by a number of domestic and international bodies, who note that the council responsible for nominating judges has been brought under the influence of the legislative and executive branches and accuse it of making politically motivated appointments.

Concerns about the independence of Polish judges have led some foreign courts, including in the Netherlands, to refuse to execute European Arrest Warrants issued by Polish courts.

The Supreme Court itself is led by a chief justice who was appointed in controversial circumstances and a majority of judges in its civic chamber were nominated after the government’s judicial reforms.

Main image credit: jaime.silva / flickr.com (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.