A judge critical of the Polish government’s judicial reforms – who has been suspended for the last 420 days after refusing to adjudicate alongside a colleague appointed under those reforms – has seen his suspension overturned, allowing him to return to work.
The decision was made by a new judicial chamber established by the government as part of its efforts to unlock frozen EU funds by rolling back its disciplinary system for judges.
Piotr Gąciarek, who sits at Warsaw’s district court, is a leading member of Iustitia, an association of judges that has regularly spoken out against the government’s judicial policies.
In September 2021, Gąciarek informed Piotr Schab, the then president of his court, that he refused to adjudicate on a case after being assigned to do so alongside a judge who had been nominated by the reformed National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), the body responsible for picking judges.
The KRS was overhauled by the government in 2017 to give politicians more influence over its composition. As a result of those changes, a number of Polish and European court rulings have deemed the KRS to no longer be a legitimate body and the judges nominated by it not to be legally appointed.
As a result of his decision, Gąciarek was brought before the disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court, a body also set up by the government as part of its judicial reforms. The chamber ruled in November 2021 that Gąciarek should be suspended indefinitely.
Last year, however, the government closed down the disciplinary chamber as part of efforts to unblock frozen European funds by meeting the EU’s rule-of-law demands (which also included allowing suspended judges to return to work). It was replaced by a new chamber of professional responsibility.
Today, that new chamber overturned Gąciarek’s suspension. It found the disciplinary chamber’s November 2021 decision to have been “defective on several levels”, reports the Gazeta Wyborcza daily.