A senior European Commission official has criticised an error by his colleagues to approve Poland's Covid recovery plan, in comments that reveal the depth of concern about the rule of law in the central European country.
Frans Timmermans, a European Commission vice-president who spent nearly four years leading EU efforts to safeguard independent courts in Poland, said the approval of Poland's long-delayed Covid recovery plan was not correct.
In an interview with the Guardian he stated publicly why he voted against approving the plan despite a Polish law aimed at bringing the country's judicial system in line with European standards.
He said that the legislation prepared and voted in the Polish parliament does not meet the milestones that we had set, and there I am in the minority within the college of EU commissioners.
The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who championed the plan, said Poland will not get more than €35.4 bn 30 bn in EU grants and loans without further progress on judicial reforms.
Timmermans was speaking before von der Leyen, who said last Friday that Poland had not done enough to get the first payment, because its new law did not meet EU standards on the independence of judges. She told reporters that they are not done with the assessment of the whole law, but this part we see already is missing.
The decision to approve Poland's long-delayed Covid recovery fund was a major moment in the six-and-a-half year dispute between Brussels and Poland over the rule of law.
In October of last year Von der Leyen set three conditions for releasing the funds: dismantling a disciplinary chamber for judges in Poland's supreme court, changing the judicial disciplinary system and reintroducing judges suspended under new rules.
Legal experts have accused the commission of paying lip service to these milestones and rewarding Poland for making cosmetic changes. One of the biggest concerns of Timmermans is the reinstatement of judges who risked their careers in defence of judicial independence.
Last year, the European court of justice called for the immediate reinstatement of judges illegally suspended by a politically controlled disciplinary tribunal of the Polish supreme court.
The commission gave Poland until the end of 2023. The process devised by Warsaw means that suspended judges will have their cases examined by so-called neo-judges appointed under the new system.
An EU law professor Laurent Pech of Middlesex University said the process was similar to asking victims of a robbery to first request a review of their robbery so that they can see the return of their stolen goods. Timmermans said the suspended judges should be reinstated without delay and without conditions. Now in the Polish system, as they have decided, the judges who were illegally removed from their functions have the right to apply for that function again, and that could take up to 18 months. Then the same people who decided that they were stripped of their function should decide whether they get their function back. I don't think that is a correct implementation of the European Court of Justice ruling and I believe that we as the guardian of the treaty have the obligation to make a correct application. Another of Von der Leyen s deputies, the Danish commission vice-president Margrethe Vestager, voted against the plan. The two commissioners responsible for EU judicial standards, V ra Jourov and Didier Reynders, opposed the decision but missed the vote.
Timmermans said he would represent the majority view, because I am also responsible for that position as a member of that commission.