2024-03-06 21:50 update: 2024-03-07, 15:14
Fot. PAP/Radek Pietruszka
The Polish parliament has adopted a resolution that the government has said will “begin the process of repairing” one the country’s top judicial bodies.
The resolution on the Constitutional Tribunal (TK), the body that checks whether laws comply with the constitution, was passed by the Sejm, the lower house of the Polish parliament, on Wednesday evening.
In a vote 240 MPs supported it while 197 opposed it.
The government has said that under the previous government, dominated by Law and Justice (PiS), the TK became politicised by the presence of judges who it considers to have been politically appointed
Speaking when the resolution was put to parliament, Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz, an MP from Civic Coalition (KO), the largest grouping in the governing coalition, said: "With this draft law, we begin the process of repairing the Constitutional Tribunal.
"The process that is necessary had been long awaited, thoroughly debated and planned sensibly," she added.
The resolution aims to kick start the reversal of changes to the TK made by PiS, which the government has said has triggered a constitutional crisis.
It was tabled by a group of MPs of the current parliamentary majority with KO at the forefront.
The bill states that the TK judges that were appointed in 2015 by the PiS government are not judges by law and that the Tribunal's president is an "unauthorised person." It also contains a call for their resignation.
According to Gasiuk-Pihowicz, the TK stopped serving its basic role, which is "to examine whether draft laws are in accordance with the constitution."
She argued that today the Tribunal brings to mind only "a mock-court, pseudo-judges, last-minute changes to the composition of the court and verdicts the content of which is known before they are delivered."
"The pseudo-judges were never real judges of the TK," she said. "And that is the premise of this bill."
But the resolution was attacked by PiS MPs.
"The resolution presented to the Sejm is disgraceful, it is an attack on the Constitution, an attack on the system of the Polish state," said Krzysztof Szczucki.
"The parliamentary caucus of the PiS party firmly opposes the adoption of this bill," he went on to say.
"We are calling for it to be rejected at its first reading, and urge all MPs to think seriously about whether they want to lend a hand to what bears all the hallmarks of treason." (PAP)
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