POLAND’S quarrels with the European Union are rich and varied. They cover, among other things, refugees, the treatment of media and logging in ancient forests. But it is the Polish government’s systematic assault on the country’s courts that arouses the deepest anxieties in Brussels. Today those concerns found their most serious expression yet, when the European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, opened proceedings against the Polish government under Article 7.1 of the EU treaty. Announcing the decision Frans Timmermans, the commission’s first vice-president, said that in the past two years Polish authorities had adopted at least 13 laws affecting the judiciary, covering ordinary courts, the constitutional tribunal, the Supreme Court and the body that selects judges. These changes, said Mr Timmermans, had rendered the independence of the judiciary “completely moot”. The EU’s 27 remaining governments must now take up the issue.
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