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Warsaw vs. Brussels | Chronicles Magazine


5-6 minutes

  _____  

By:Srdja Trifkovic | December 21, 2017 

 

On December 20 the European Commission (EC) took the unprecedented step 
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/20/eu-process-poland-voting-rights> 
 of activating Article 7.1 of the Lisbon Treaty against Poland. The EC accuses 
the Law and Justice (PiS) government in Warsaw of “putting fundamental 
democratic rights at risk” by enacting 13 laws to reform the country’s 
judiciary which make it easier to replace the nation’s top judges. Brussels 
claims that those laws would enable the government to pack the entire justice 
system structure, and especially the key Constitutional Tribunal, with 
political appointees.

Clause 7.1 allows the EU to punish member states which fail to uphold “human 
dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law, and respect for human 
rights.” This does not mean that the “nuclear option” will be duly applied and 
Poland’s voting rights within the EU automatically suspended, but the procedure 
may be initiated if in the next three months the government in Warsaw does not 
act to reverse its alleged “serious and persistent” violations of EU values.

Even then such outcome is not preordained. The decision on sanctions has to be 
unanimous, and Hungary (which has its own problems with Brussels) has already 
promised to veto it. Eight weeks ago, Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orbán – 
who supports the creation of a “migrant-free zone” in Central Europe – rejected 
changes to the EU asylum system which would force all 28 member states to 
accept “asylum seekers” against the will of their people. In addition, Orbán is 
the EU’s bête noire because of his determined steps to close George Soros’s 
various outfits in Hungary, including his university in Budapest.

Poland’s prime minister Mateusz 
<https://www.politico.eu/article/poland-reshuffle-new-pm-morawiecki-szydlo-kaczynski/>
  Morawiecki—who took over from Beata Szydlo on December 11—is adamant that the 
program of judiciary reforms will go ahead as planned, and that it is wholly 
within Poland’s sovereign rights to see it completed. Standing up to the EC is 
popular in Poland, which like its other three Visegrad Group 
<http://www.visegradgroup.eu>  partners (Hungary, the Czech Republic and 
Slovakia) resists demands from Brussels 
<https://www.ft.com/content/03549c2e-5040-11e7-a1f2-db19572361bb>  to accept 
mandatory migrant quotas for resettlement.

It is ironic that the Brussels Apparat should take Poland to task for 
“violating democratic norms.” The EU is a deeply undemocratic behemoth, with 
enormous power vested in its unelected and unaccountable bureaucracy. Its key 
institutions—the Commission, the Parliament, the Council and the Court of 
Justice—are controlled by the supporters of an ever tighter union. The EC—the 
most powerful body of the lot—is composed of 28 unelected commissioners. The 
Parliament has no power to propose laws, only to suggest amendments to laws 
proposed by the Commission. Such amendments then need to be accepted by the EC 
before they can become effective.

The Council of the EU, where each member-country is represented at summits by 
its head of state or government, functions as just “the Council” most of the 
time. Its decisions are made by qualified majority voting 
<http://eur-lex.europa.eu/summary/glossary/qualified_majority.html> , making 
the Franco-German axis dominant by default. Its directives and conclusions, 
once issued, become mandatory in all 28 member-countries: national laws have to 
be in compliance with the Council’s decisions. And finally, as for the Court of 
Justice, which is supposed to interpret EU laws to ensure their compliance with 
the EU treaties, it does not do this 
<http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/matthew-ellery/eu-referendum_b_9514608.html> . 
Quite the contrary, “it happily ignores the treaties when it wants to if the EU 
is pushing its own federalist agenda . . . [It is] wilfully ignoring the rule 
of law, as it did with the bailouts . . . The treaties clearly stated bailouts 
were illegal, but as the bailouts helped to prop up the failing Eurozone 
project, the EU court allowed them anyway.”

The root cause of Warsaw’s problems with the EU establishment is not in the 
reform of the judicial system. It is in the fact that Poland is still a 
patriotic Christian country, and the Brussels elite actively promotes an 
anti-Christian, anti-European agenda. To its members it is unacceptable and 
repugnant that, last October, more than a million Poles lined the country’s 
2000-mile-long borders with lit candles to pray for the salvation of their 
country.

That day, as I pointed out in this month’s magazine column, was the Roman 
Catholic Feast of the Holy Rosary, established by Pope Pius V in 1571 as “Our 
Lady of Victory” after the Holy League triumphed over the Muslim fleet at the 
Battle of Lepanto. And in the current dispute between Warsaw and Brussels, 
wszyscy jestesmy Polakami!

 

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