Poland’s minister of justice has offered a compromise to the European Commission concerning how judges are chosen in the Polish judiciary system, saying the country would be willing to implement Germany’s system for choosing judges.
“As a gesture of good faith, I have proposed a possible compromise as part of choosing new judges in Poland to the commissioner [Vera Jourova],” Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro announced at the press conference after his meeting with the Deputy President of the European Commission (EC) Vera Jourova
Jourova emphasized that the talks between herself and Minister Ziobro were “long and detailed”.
The Polish minister said he was ready to convince the Polish government to consider working on a new model of choosing judges that reflected the one currently in place in Germany.
Will the EU accept Poland’s proposal?
“Judges are chosen solely by politicians [in the German system], with representatives of the Bundestag and the justice ministers of the German states, so the division is really 50-50 between the executive branch and parliamentary authority and only the voice of those two bodies influences the decision on who is a judge in German federal courts,” the Polish minister said.
Ziobro stressed that he did not see the possibility of returning the old “corporation model” in place in Poland, as he believed it was damaging and dysfunctional.
He also emphasized that the Polish government will not permit the segregation of states within the European Union.
The Polish minister explained that it is unacceptable “that in some EU states the European Commission permits the choice of judges by the citizens indirectly in through a democratic mechanism, such as in Germany, and in another state, like Poland, where we are introducing a very indirect mechanism of democratic control in the process of choosing judges, we are told we cannot do so.”
Ziobro underlined, that it is impermissible for Poland to be told that “others can do something, whereas Poles cannot.”
