Commission sends Warsaw new rule of law test

Timmermans didn’t rule out going after Poland’s EU voting rights should it ignore latest warnings.

Brussels will give Poland two months to respond to “additional recommendations” on how to address concerns over respect for the rule of law, European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans told reporters Wednesday.

Emerging from the last meeting of European commissioners before Christmas, at which Poland’s constitutional crisis was discussed, Timmermans said the Commission’s previous recommendations to Warsaw “have not been solved.”

Last weekend saw demonstrations against the governing Law and Justice (PiS) party’s plans to curtail media access to parliament and an irregular vote on the annual budget. And on Tuesday, critics accused President Andrzej Duda of avoiding due process by directly appointing a new acting head of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, the powerful body at the center of the Commission’s initial complaint against PiS in January.

“There is a persistent problem with the rule of law,” Timmermans said, adding that the principle was “the basis on which a whole European structure is built.”

The new recommendations, almost a year after the Commission first launched a rule of law procedure, will be made public “shortly,” Timmermans said. He added that based on Poland’s response the Commission will determine whether “further measures would be taken.”

Asked whether the Commission would trigger an Article 7 procedure against Poland, which would allow for its voting rights in the Council of the EU to be suspended, Timmermans said: “We will not exclude any measure that we can take in the framework of the rule of law, but we will cross the bridge when we get there.”

In July, the Commission said there was a “systemic threat” to the rule of law in the Central European country and called for the Constitutional Tribunal to be allowed to act as “an effective constitutional review.”

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