Published: Less than 20 min ago
Poland’s highest court has gone against the ruling party, overturning President Andrzej Duda’s controversial 2015 pardon of three top officials.
But the issue is complicated by the government’s influence over the Polish judiciary.
The case concerns Mariusz Kaminski, currently interior minister and head of the intelligence service, who was sentenced to three years in prison in 2015 for abuse of power as head of a state anti-corruption office. His deputy and two other officials were also convicted.
All three appealed the sentence, but were pardoned the same year by President Andrzej Duda before the case was tried in a higher instance.
That the Supreme Court now annuls the president’s pardon and demands a new trial of the case is described as “surprising” and “rare independence” as it goes against Duda’s ruling conservative and nationalist party Law and Justice, which for years has worked to gain greater control over the judiciary.
Control over court
However, the issue is complicated as the criticized legal overhaul initiated by Poland’s government after the 2015 election has caused chaos in the judiciary.
The government has succeeded in gaining control of the Constitutional Court, which ruled last week that the Supreme Court does not have the right to exercise judicial control over presidential pardons.
Supreme Court judge Piotr Mirek, for his part, contested this, saying: “The Supreme Court considers that the Constitutional Court’s judgment… did not have any legal consequences.”
Several setbacks
In recent days, the Polish government has faced several setbacks. On Monday, the European Court of Justice ruled that Poland’s controversial judicial overhaul in 2019 is against EU law.
The day before, an estimated 500,000 protesters gathered in the streets of Warsaw in what was described as the largest anti-government demonstration in the country since the fall of communism.
Polish state media have received criticism for their coverage of the demonstration. The state television company TVP is said to have, among other things, downplayed the extent of the protest and called it a “hate march”.