The National Judicial Council states that court presidents organizing primary elections for its members are committing a crime.
KRS Response to Court Presidents
The latest KRS position is a response to Monday’s appeal signed by presidents of 10 appellate courts who called on judges to participate in primaries for the KRS. These primaries would involve evaluating candidates through meetings of judges in all courts held on the same day, following identical voting procedures and regulations.
To ensure the legitimacy of the KRS’s judicial members selected through this process, all judges must participate, and the process must be fully democratic, transparent, and fair. The court presidents have pledged to organize the entire process transparently without interference in the electoral process.
KRS Disapproves of the Procedure
In its latest statement, the KRS responded to the described appeal with “disapproval.” The council emphasized that the procedure proposed by court presidents would make MPs “notaries” accepting the results of such voting. Meanwhile, the council noted that the procedure for selecting its members has been fully regulated by law in accordance with the Constitution.
Legal Concerns Raised
The authors of the statement argue that “any supplementing of the procedure through extra-statutory means violates the principle of legality and rule of law specified in Article 7 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland,” while a public official’s participation in organizing an extra-statutory procedure for selecting Council members exceeds their authority and harms the public interest, potentially constituting a crime under Article 231 of the Penal Code.
Rejection of Mandatory Participation
The council firmly rejected the suggestion in the presidents’ appeal that judges’ participation in primaries should be universal and mandatory. The council noted that while the law on the judiciary allows for compulsory attendance at general meetings of judges, “it cannot serve as an instrument of pressure on judges and imposing service-based compulsion to participate in extra-statutory activities of a judicial self-government body that constitutes an usurpation of competences.”
KRS Call to Action
Taking all these circumstances into account, the KRS presidium called on judges serving as presidents of appellate courts to withdraw from organizing primaries for KRS candidates and appealed to all judges to “resist pressure.”