25 October 2024 – Budapest
Prof. Dr. Paweł Czubik – “The State of the Rule of Law in today’s Poland”/ “Dispute in 2024 over foreign service competencies between the President and Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland – illegal actions of the Polish government in the sphere of diplomatic practice.”
- The dissemination event of the grant’s theme took place in Budapest on October 25, 2024, during the EuCET 5th conference entitled “Patriotic Intellectuals for Europe”.
- Grant manager Pawel Czubik participated in the panel discussion “The State of the Rule of Law in today’s Poland”. His speech was entitled “Dispute in 2024 over foreign service competencies between the President and Prime Minister of the Republic of Poland – illegal actions of the Polish government in the sphere of diplomatic practice.”
- It is worth noting that the Hungarian journalist chairing the panel introduced both Professor P. Czubik and Professor G. Pastuszko (who participated in the panel) as professors at the Central European Academy in Budapest.
- Traditionally, Polish is, along with Hungarian, the official language of the EuCET conference, hence the panel was conducted in a Polish-Hungarian format with simultaneous translation into both languages.
- Statements related to the topic of the grant are from minute 6:30 to 7:55 and from minute 29:21 to 30:47 on the attached recording.
- The conference was broadcast on CÖF-CÖKA’s web and YouTube channel.
Participants of the panel discussion:
Prof. Dr. habil. Pawel Czubik, professor of law at the Cracow University of Economics and the head of the Department of International Public and European Law, Judge and member of the Extraordinary Review and Public Affairs Chamber of the Polish Supreme Court.
Prof. UR Dr. Grzegorz Pastuszko, Judge of the Polish Supreme Court
Dr Bartosz Lewandowski, researcher of the Ordo Iuris Institute, Poland
Moderator: Irén Rab historian, journalist
Below is a transcription and summary of Paweł Czubik’s entire speech in English translation, the whole video is available via: https://civilek.info/2024/10/31/v-eucet-konferencia-panelbeszelgetes-a-lengyel-jogallamisag-helyzete-napjainkban-videoval/
Ladies and Gentlemen!
Good morning, welcome to you all, I am very pleased. I am glad to be able to speak in Polish. It is a tradition that Polish is the official language of the conferences held by President Csizmadia, and we are glad that this tradition has been preserved.
We Poles are here every year, and every year we are deeply honoured to be able to perform in front of our Hungarian brothers. This is very important for us. We came here to Hungary, and we feel this breath of freedom, we feel that this is a free country. This is very important for us.
What has changed in Poland? Let’s analyse it briefly. If we saw what the foreign media reported recently, Minister Bodnar, Minister of Justice announced that Poland had moved up a lot in the so-called ranking of the rule of law, because a working group appointed by some NGO said that all the standards were just beginning to be met. Of course, he didn’t say that this working group includes himself and his colleagues, and this is the main reason for this “promotion.”
Because the truth indeed is that very strange things are happening in Poland these days. These strange things are happening on very different levels, from the fact that we are dealing with puzzling behaviour in the destruction of the judiciary, to the fact that we are dealing with something very disturbing because Poland’s international legal position has also been significantly weakened.
We have a conflict between the government and the president regarding diplomacy and the appointment of ambassadors. This is extremely worrying, because at the moment, practically speaking, the Republic of Poland does not have an active foreign service at the level of ambassadors. In this context, Poland is a very crippled state. This is the result of a dispute over certain constitutional norms. Poland’s problem is that our constitution is a bit underdeveloped in some aspects, and as a result, we are in trouble.
Yet for the most part, what we are dealing with is a blatant violation of the law by the current ruling coalition. I repeat: this is an outright violation of the law. There is a violation of norms which under normal conditions should absolutely not be violated. It was announced in Poland (I will not refer to politicians, because I am not a politician, and I am not allowed to speak as a judge or as a politician) that one of the politicians said that we are dealing in Poland with such a thing as “fighting democracy”.
It can be said that we have a tradition in Poland that if you add something to the word democracy (by the way, in Hungary it was the same – “people’s democracy”, for example), it means that it is no longer democracy. If we add the word “fighting” to the word “democracy” it means that we no longer have democracy in Poland. The question is, what are they fighting for? Because if we look at the means, then here I agree with my colleague from Italy, who spoke earlier, that this is actually Marxism, in which any means is good to reach some goal. So, there is a kind of Marxist ideology in the background. And with democracy and fighting democracy, there is the same difference like between a chair and an electric chair. The added word changes the whole meaning. Unfortunately, this is the situation. I think we will go into more detail in a moment, because there are many things worth mentioning.
I wanted to add one more thing, to my colleague’s previous comment, if I may. Namely, what you may have missed before we move on to Catholicism. The main problem with the dispute over the rule of law in Poland is the problem that everything now in Poland is done bypassing the powers of the President of the Republic of Poland. This national prosecutor, who was appointed illegally, his legal predecessor recalled illegally – the idea was that the President would not give his consent, because he has to give his consent – this follows from statutory provisions.
At the moment in the Republic of Poland, ambassadors are replaced without the consent of the President, and recalled to the country. The President does not consent to new ambassadors, (it is his constitutional right) – Poland thus has no ambassadors in most countries of the world.
The whole policy is to minimize the role of the President of the Republic of Poland, who now has two hundred and a few dozen days until the end of his term. The idea is to make these few hundred days such that Poland will be a country in a state of decay, a country in which there is virtually no legal certainty.
This is what the situation looks like at the moment. Solutions that are absolutely contrary to the law are being applied. Let me give you an example. At the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Sejm, we recently had a situation when, contrary to the rules of procedure of the committee and the rules of law, first of all, candidates for ambassadors, that no one wanted to elect, were voted on again. Despite the fact that the rule clearly states that after one vote, if a candidate for ambassador is forfeited, he is definitely forfeited and is not elected, now a second, another vote was taken until finally his candidacy was voted for.
In addition, they increased the number of people in the committee illegally – adding additional deputies from their party in order to have a majority. And that’s basically it. It is also worth mentioning that although the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations says that it is the Head of State who receives ambassadors and sends ambassadors, in our country in Poland now its powers from Article 133 of the Constitution have actually been taken away from the President.
Going back to the question of how the Polish public reacts. I, unfortunately, am quite sceptical. Firstly, Polish society is a divided society. Secondly, it is also a society that has changed. Young people are characterized by a deficit in education – maybe I shouldn’t say that, because I teach students myself. This results in a way of thinking about the state, about statehood, about the community, which is a new the way of thinking we did not have to deal with before. Perhaps colleagues will be more optimistic, but I am unfortunately sceptical, and I think this is what awaits all the countries of the world, especially the countries of our area of Europe. Unfortunately, youth is developing strangely now. I am not convinced that we will succeed in turning this society around.
