The EU’s rule-of-law trap (video)

This video interview is an enhanced version, with improved easy-to-read English subtitles, of a video interview in Polish that was first published on our YouTube channel and on Sovereignty.pl on July 31.

With the sudden unlocking of EU recovery funds for Poland by the European Commission, just days after former President of the European Council Donald Tusk, who was favored by Brussels in Poland’s October 15 election, took the oath of office as Poland’s new prime minister, the content of this discussion is more relevant than ever.

Indeed, none of the changes in Polish law that were demanded by the European Commission as a preliminary condition to unlock those funds have yet been initiated, let alone adopted by parliament. This concerns in particular those changes relating to the judicial reforms that had been pushed through parliament under Mateusz Morawiecki’s government and were said in Brussels to be in violation of the EU’s rule-of-law principles.

The European Commission’s hasty decision seems to confirm, however, that the rule of law is just an excuse to influence national policies and elections in member states, forcing them to fall in line with the ideologies and policies that are preferred in Brussels and to surrender more of their sovereignty to the EU’s Court of Justice.

Or at least this is how many Poles, in particular on the right side of the political debate, will see it.

These are precisely the theses defended and explained by Michał Sopiński, Ph.D., the rector of Warsaw’s Higher School of the Judiciary, in this video discussion, which took place in July with Paweł Lisicki, the editor-in-chief of Do Rzeczy, an influential conservative weekly in Poland.

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