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Last year in Berlin a wild boar scored 15 minutes of fame when it snatched an unattended laptop bag at a city lake – and was photographed with its naked owner in hot pursuit.
Now a wild boar in neighbouring Poland has triggered a new round in Warsaw’s long-running stand-off with Brussels on judicial reform and the rule of law.
The case in question itself is remarkably unremarkable: a Polish maker of football turf sued the Polish government seeking more compensation for product damaged by wild boar.
The case wound its way through Poland’s legal system and found its way to Strasbourg’s European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), where the company claimed a violation of its right to a fair trial under the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights.
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The previous stop for the case was at Poland’s constitutional court where, the company argued, one of the judges hearing the case shouldn’t have been on the bench at all.
On Friday, the Strasbourg court agreed and ruled that Poland's highest legal institution was, effectively, illegal.
Nomination of judges
Chief among the Strasbourg court’s complaints: how, in 2015, Poland’s ruling national conservative Law and Justice (PiS) used its majority to nominate three judges to the bench, disregarding those chosen by the previous parliament.
One of these unlawfully elected judges was involved in the boar-football turf case and thus the chamber’s ruling had no sound legal basis.
On Friday, Poland’s constitutional tribunal dismissed the Strasbourg ruling as irrelevant – but things are not that straightforward.
Warsaw has yet to indicate whether it will demand a referral of the case to the ECHR grand chamber for a final ruling. It also knows the case – and Poland’s courts – now face additional scrutiny by the Council of Europe, the continent’s leading human rights body under whose auspices the Strasbourg court operates.
On Monday, in a very unusual step, that court informed Warsaw that it was prioritising five similar cases in its inbox. Two involve judges and a third a state prosecutor, all of whom have come into conflict with their superiors and the ruling party in recent years.
Politically beholden
Warsaw insists its five-year reform push has freed the judicial system of inefficiencies and post-communist cliques; critics accuse the government of creating legal chaos and a politically beholden judicial system.
This has all caused a stir in continental and European legal circles. At home, the ruling has raised fresh questions about the legitimacy of the three PiS judges and all constitutional cases in which they have been involved since 2015, including a controversial ruling last October that effectively outlawed abortion.
Meanwhile, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) will soon issue its own ruling on challenges to Polish judicial reform.
Though completely separate to the ECHR,the CJEU – the EU’s highest court – has always shown a collegial interest in the other’s rulings.
More immediately, the Strasbourg ruling may revive concerns of other national courts around Europe about co-operating with Polish courts – in particular on European arrest warrants and family law cases.