The Polish Parliament Reshapes Courts, Drawing Criticism

WARSAW — Poland’s Parliament on Friday adopted widely condemned legislation to reshape the country’s courts, shrugging off criticism from the European Union and local opponents that the measures would threaten the rule of law and place judges more firmly under government control.

Leaders of the right-wing ruling party, Law and Justice, have long championed the laws as necessary to fix a broken judicial system and rid it of corruption. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the party’s leader, and other officials have also defended Poland’s sovereign right to structure its courts as it sees fit, without outside interference.

“It’s a dark day for Polish democracy,” Grzegorz Schetyna, head of the leading opposition party Civic Platform, told journalists after the vote. “Something embarrassing and shameful happened.”

During Friday’s parliamentary debate, members of the ruling party did not to speak, saying they did not want to “provoke” opponents. But after a protest group called Citizens of the Republic of Poland called upon Poles to converge on Parliament, several hundred people gathered outside, some carrying a huge Polish flag, singing the national anthem and chanting, “Freedom, equality, democracy.”

Efforts to pass earlier versions of the court measures in the summer had drawn tens of thousands of Poles into the streets, a surge that subsided only when President Andrzej Duda, nominally nonpartisan, shocked his former colleagues in the ruling Law and Justice Party by vetoing two of the most-criticized bills.

The president presented his own versions in the fall, which the ruling party then amended and approved on Friday.

Opponents said these new versions did little to dispel the original concerns. The Venice Commission, a legal group attached to the Council of Europe, said on Friday that the draft laws constituted a “serious threat to the independence of the judiciary.”

Nils Muiznieks, the council’s human rights commissioner, said that a recent visit to Warsaw had confirmed the threat to him. “These laws will further undermine the independence of the judiciary by subordinating it to the executive and the Legislature and will, thereby, further erode the separation of powers and the rule of law,” he said in a statement.

The swift vote came a day after the ruling party’s political committee decided to begin a long-planned ministerial reshuffle by removing Beata Szydlo as prime minister and replacing her with the current finance minister, Mateusz Morawiecki.

Law and Justice officials said Mr. Morawiecki, who has a background in international banking, would be better able to explain Poland’s position to international critics. But their opponents said it was just a ploy to distract attention from Friday’s court bills.

Since Law and Justice took power in late 2015, relations between Warsaw and the European Union have been strained over concerns that Mr. Kaczynski was leading the country in an authoritarian direction.

This week, the European Commission voted to take Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic before the International Court of Justice over the countries’ refusal to accept refugees. Even before Friday’s vote, the commission had initiated a disciplinary process over the Polish court legislation that could result in sanctions or even a loss of voting rights.

Two bills were approved on Friday, the first involving the Supreme Court. Earlier legislation called for the entire court, made up of more than 80 judges, to be fired, with replacements appointed by the government.

The new version lowers the retirement age for the court’s judges to 65 from 70, effectively forcing the immediate removal of 40 percent of the justices. That bill was approved by a vote of 239 to 171.

The second bill covered the National Judiciary Council, which selects the candidates to be judges. Previously, 15 of the council’s 25 members were chosen by a panel of judges. Under the earlier proposal, those 15 would have needed approval by a majority vote in Parliament.

Under the new version passed on Friday, candidates would need a 60 percent vote, although subsequent amendments meant that could revert to a simple majority vote in time. It passed 237 to 166.

“A free and independent Supreme Council has just fallen,” said Monika Wielichowska, an opposition member of Parliament. “You have demolished the constitution and democracy. And now you’re destroying the National Judiciary Council.”

The bills must still pass the Senate — a foregone conclusion given the ruling party’s dominance in that chamber — and then be signed by the president. Mr. Duda is expected to sign them this time, since their passage followed months of closed-door talks with Mr. Kaczynski over the content of the legislation.

A top presidential aide, Pawel Mucha, addressing Parliament on Friday, said the bills were in line with the Polish Constitution and were needed for “the reform of the judiciary.”