Warsaw, Poland
This summer, the country is seeking to fill 44 vacancies, with more expected in coming months. The positions come with prestige, power and chambers in the court building, a modern Warsaw take on a Greek classic that sits adjacent to a memorial to the city’s doomed anti-Nazi uprising.
What the jobs don’t have is many takers. In a land of some 10,000 judges, judicial applications barely exceed the number of openings.
The lack of interest reflects the nearly unanimous opposition of Poland’s black-robed jurists to what they see as an attempted hostile takeover of the judiciary by the ruling party. Critics said that the process, which has been underway for three years, is culminating with a bid to pack the country’s highest court with cronies and opportunists.
Rather than seek the Supreme Court posts, the vast majority of judges are boycotting them.
They don’t expect to stop the appointments. But they want no part of a development they argue will mark the death of the independent court system nearly three decades after the fall of communism.
“The selection of new judges will be a pure fiction,” said Dariusz Zawistowski, chief justice in the Supreme Court’s civil division. “And with it, this institution will become completely politicized. The inheritance of 1989 — what we were most proud of — will be gone.”
The takeover has the potential to dramatically reshape Poland, a nation of 39 million that is the largest of the Central European countries once locked behind the Iron Curtain.
The right-wing Law and Justice party has changed in Poland in other ways, transforming the media landscape and introducing a new school curriculum. But the judicial changes have been the most far-reaching.
With a pliant Supreme Court, critics say, Law and Justice will have a free hand to govern Poland in the manner of the old Communist Party: punishing opponents and acting without fear of judicial restraint.