Judiciary Saga in Poland: an Affair Torn Between European Standards and ECtHR Criteria

Judicial independence is a cornerstone of contemporary constitutional systems within European legal orders that Poland, among many other European States, codified the principle at a constitutional level through Article 173 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. Nonetheless, the concrete implementation of the theoretical framework remains a bone of contention between the national States and the main international actors. The latter faction, based on the acknowledgement that no single political model could ideally comply with the principle of the separation of powers and secure complete independence of the judiciary, has developed an impressive number of legal tools that are part of a more diffuse European trend of interpretation, which should be labelled as European standard or European corpus aiming at preserving the judiciary order from outward interferences by the legislative and executive powers. In Poland, after the extensive victory earned by the Law and Justice (PIS) party in the Parliamentary election of 2015, the executive branch propelled a series of interlock reforms with the aim of reshuffling the whole judicial asset of the country. In the first place, the way forward was marked by a compound diatribe concerning the Constitutional Tribunal, and the essence of the dispute concerned the mandate’s legitimacy of three