Lower house adopts amendment changing judiciary council election process
The Sejm, Poland's lower house of parliament, has passed an amendment to the Act on the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS) that alters the way judges can be nominated to the body.
Under the amendment, adopted on Friday in a 244-to-199 vote with no abstentions, KRS members can be named only by fellow judges and not, as has been the case since the beginning of 2018, by the Sejm.
The amendment envisages that 15 judge-members of the KRS are to be elected in a direct and secret ballot by all judges in Poland.
After new members of the KRS have been elected, the current judge-members would lose their seats.
According to the amendment, the right to run for a seat on the KRS will not be available to judges appointed to the body based on a motion submitted to the president after the changes made to the body in 2017.
Earlier, the Sejm voted against motions submitted by the main opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS), and the far-right Confederation party to reject the new provisions.
PiS sought the removal of provisions depriving KRS judges of the passive electoral right if they took up their positions after the changes introduced in 2017.
PiS also wanted to ensure that the tenure of newly elected KRS members will begin in spring 2026, after the tenure of current judges ends.
The Sejm rejected all PiS's amendments.
However, a minority motion proposed by Tomasz Zimoch, an MP from Poland 2050, a party in the ruling coalition, regarding the "immediate" inclusion by the KRS of broadcast records and minutes of its proceedings in the Bulletin of Public Information, a Polish system of unified public records online, was accepted.
Now the amendment will go to the Senate.
The amendment passed by the Sejm on Friday comes as a further measure aimed at rolling back the previous PiS government's judicial changes.
Under the changes to the KRS introduced in 2017, its members, which had previously been elected by the judges themselves, were nominated by politicians.
This prompted accusations that the so-called 'neo-KRS' had fallen under the political influence of the government.
It also triggered nationwide protests, and spurred the European Commission into launching rule-of-law infringement procedures against Poland, which cost the country billions of euros in withheld EU funding.
In 2022, the Supreme Court found that the new KRS was not compatible with the constitution.
The European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the EU have also found irregularities in the procedure of appointing KRS judges. (PAP)
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