Europe confronts Poland over its trampling on the rule of law

EVER SINCE the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party took power in 2015, Adam Bodnar, Poland’s human-rights ombudsman, has been warning against its relentless efforts to get control of the courts. To illustrate the danger, he uses an expression from communist times: lex telefonica. In the Polish People’s Republic, verdicts were routinely dictated by a phone call from an apparatchik at party headquarters. Today’s government has more subtle techniques, but the goal is the same, Mr Bodnar says: “If a judge has a case on his desk with some political importance, he should be afraid.”

The European Commission is worried, too. It accuses PiS of violating Poland’s commitments to the rule of law under the European Union’s founding treaty. In 2017 the commission took Poland to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over laws that gave politicians control over appointing judges. (For example, they lowered judges’ retirement age while letting the justice minister pick whom to exempt.) The ECJ ruled against the Poles, who had in the meantime scrapped some of the measures.