A new report by the Civil Development Forum (FOR) summarizes the state of the rule of law in Poland after five years of the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s rule and analyzes the current situation from a comparative perspective of the EU countries.
Poland is the only EU country in which vast majority of the Members of the Council of the Judiciary are selected by the parliament. Poland is also marked red when it comes to disciplinary proceedings against judges.
Zbigniew Ziobro, the Polish Minister of Justice, has vowed to submit a motion aimed at withdrawing Poland from the Istanbul Convention, the Council of Europe´s Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence. He said the Convention contains harmful, ideological elements. He also stressed that Poland is doing just fine with protection of women rights and prevention of domestic violence without the Convention. Ziobro’s deputy Marcin Romanowski added that Poland should drop…
In Poland’s Presidential election, Andrzej Duda, the incumbent with strong ties to the Law and Justice (PiS) party, secured his re-election by a tiny majority of just 1.2% over his liberal rival, Rafał Trzaskowski.
The popular Warsaw mayor, Trzaskowski did not join the election campaign until mid-May, but he set the tone from the beginning. The 48-year-old politician of the opposition Civic Platform (PO) and former European Minister is a feared opponent of the PiS.
During one of his campaign speeches, the current president of Poland, Andrzej Duda, who runs for re-election, compared promoting “LGBT ideology” to something worse than communism. This statement has led to a spiral of hatred.
The presidential election in Poland, which was cancelled at short notice in May, will now take place on June 28. The new opposition candidate, Rafal Trzaskowski, is now positioning himself as the strongest challenger to incumbent Andrzej Duda.
The delayed elections give the opposition a small but significant window of opportunity to make known the responsibilities of the office of president – to make often tricky decisions for the good of the nation. President Duda has already shown to be Kaczynski’s president, not the people’s president.
Today is Wednesday, May 6, three days before the planned presidential election in Poland and it is still not known if and when they will be held.
The increasingly autocratic tendencies observed in Poland and Hungary during the COVID-19 crisis have alarmed the EU. With street protests currently banned, human rights activists fear that the pandemic will be used by national conservative governments to consolidate their power and undermine democracy and human rights.
