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Saturday night posted on Twitter Chief Judge Kees Sterk and Professor of European Justice at Maastricht University see a photo showing (supposedly) a parliamentary motion that the Dutch government, along with other governments, should sue Hungary and Poland for their deficiencies in the state of law. The vote on the petition is said to now take place in the Dutch Parliament on Tuesday. Even though we don’t know Dutch, but in the text we only see the name of Poland, not of Hungary.
It should also be noted that it was precisely the day on which the European Court of Justice issued a judgment that stated that in the Netherlands prosecutors can also receive instructions from the executive branch in specific cases and therefore cannot be considered a “judicial authority” in the absence of independence; – Hungarian Justice Minister Judit Varga drew attention to the verdict.
With regard to the Dutch parliamentary communication, it is worth remembering that even in the summer, a Dutch court formally questioned the independence of the Polish judicial system, when he had to decide on the extradition of a Pole. According to the International Chamber of the Amsterdam District Court, the Polish judicial system has long been independent of the government and parliament, so it did not extradite it on the grounds that an independent judiciary could not be guaranteed at home and appealed before the Court of Justice of the European Union.
As we write then: this case can still be big, in fact, the Dutch court ruling recalled that since 2017, the independence of Polish courts and, as a result, the right to a fair trial have come under increasing pressure. According to the Dutch court, there is, among other things, political interference in the appointment of judges and, at the end of 2019, new legislation was enacted in the field of judicial disciplinary law.
Together, all these developments affect the independence of Polish courts to such an extent that, according to the ICC (the International Chamber of the Dutch court in question), they can no longer be independent of the Polish government and the Polish parliament.
The decision at that time also acknowledges that this case could have far-reaching consequences, but also submitted questions to the Court of Justice of the European Communities for a ruling. “The ICZM wants to know whether it should really refuse to hand over a suspect to an EU Member State if the courts of that Member State can no longer act independently. They are asking the Court about these issues for the first time. This means that the Luxembourg court will have to decide whether the Polish judicial system functions independently of the government, that is, whether the person awaiting extradition faces the corresponding judicial consequences in Poland or whether he will not be extradited.
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