EU court rejects Poland’s complaint over unpaid coal mine fines

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has upheld the decision by the European Commission to levy €68.5 million in fines imposed on Poland for failing to comply with an CJEU order to suspend operations at the Turów coal mine.

In doing so, the court rejected a complaint filed by the former Polish government, which argued that the commission had acted unlawfully in taking the money after Poland had reached a settlement with the Czech Republic that ended the dispute over the mine.

The Czech Republic first brought its case against Poland before the CJEU in 2021. It claimed that Warsaw’s decision to extend the operation of Turów, an open-cast lignite mine near the Czech border, was contrary to EU law and would cause environmental damage in the Czech Republic.

As an interim measure, the CJEU ordered the mine to suspend operations for the duration of the court proceedings. Poland refused to comply, arguing that the continued operation of the mine and nearby power plant, which produced 7% of Poland’s electricity, was crucial for energy security.

As a result, the CJEU in September 2021 ordered Poland to begin paying daily fines of €500,000 until it complied. Poland then refused to pay those fines, leading the European Commission to deduct the money, €68.5 million in total, from Poland’s EU funds.

In 2022, after it had reached an agreement with the Czech Republic to end the dispute over the mine, Poland launched a complaint against the European Commission’s actions.

It argued that “the settlement [with the Czech Republic] had the result that the financial effects of the measures ordered by the Court of Justice had ceased retroactively”, wrote the CJEU in a press release announcing Wednesday’s ruling.

“Poland submitted that the commission’s offsetting [of the money from EU funds] is therefore unlawful,” it added. The money levied by the commission came from fines issued to Poland before the agreement with Prague, but it took the money after the agreement had been reached.

In its ruling on Wednesday, the CJEU dismissed Poland’s complaint in its entirety. It found that the removal of the case from the court’s register following the settlement with the Czech Republic did not relieve Poland of the obligation to settle the fines already accrued.

“Otherwise, the objective of the periodic penalty payment, namely to guarantee the effective application of EU law, such application being an essential component of the rule of law, would not be attained,” noted the court.

It therefore found that the European Commission, which was responsible for collecting the fines, “could legitimately offset the amounts payable in respect of that periodic penalty payment against amounts owed to Poland by the European Union”.

Poland can still appeal against the ruling. However, that decision will now be down to the new, more pro-EU government, led by Donald Tusk, that replaced PiS in power in December.

PiS MEP Beata Kempa told the Do Rzeczy weekly that she expects the Tusk government to file an appeal. However, she also expressed doubt as to how genuine that appeal would be.

Her PiS colleague in the European Parliament, Anna Zalewska, also called on the government to show “firm action to defend the interests of Poland” in the case. She called the CJEU’s ruling a “scandalous decision” that “legitimises lawlessness”.

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Main image credit: Petr Vodička/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alicja Ptak

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