The EU’s Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled that elements of controversial judicial reforms undertaken in Poland in 2017 were unlawful.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party had lowered its retirement ages for judges and public prosecutors to 60 years for women and 65 years for men — down from 67 years for both sexes.
This reform, in turn, gave the Polish minister of justice the power to decide whether individual judges could continue past the newly stipulated retirement age.
But the European Union’s top court found on Monday that both these reforms were in breach of EU law due to “directly discriminatory conditions based on sex” and on conditions that could pave the way to underminings of judicial independence.
This ruling follows a similar such result from the ECJ in June, which found the lowering of retirement ages of Poland’s Supreme Court justices to also be “contrary to EU law.”
