In an opinion piece published on the newsweek.com website, Jorge González-Gallarza said that the EU was trying to "leverage coronavirus relief to force compliance from conservative governments in Poland and Hungary, putting the entire continent's financial stability at risk."
He argued that EU treaties require countries to respect the rule of law when both joining the bloc and staying on as members, but what the notion exactly means “is left vague, beyond the usual bromides about independent judiciaries and the recourse to contest arbitrary decisions.”
González-Gallarza also said that despite ideas by Euro-federalists to merge Europe’s vastly different systems into a single judiciary, EU treaties do not explicitly dictate how constitutional court judges should be appointed and how their mandate should be regulated.
“Part of this ambiguity owes to the difficulty of laying a concrete benchmark for ‘rule of law’ among countries that remain, compared to the rest of the world, all good exemplars of it,” González-Gallarza said.
“This vagueness, as it turns out, has been used to turn ‘rule of law’ into a cudgel against countries whose prime culpability is not legal, but political,” he added in his opinion piece, entitled "The EU's Democratic Backsliding Against Poland and Hungary."
González-Gallarza is a co-host of the Uncommon Decency podcast on European issues and an associate researcher at Fundación Civismo, according to newsweek.com.
The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that the EU’s new, much-hyped rule-of-law mechanism, which seeks to tie access to EU funds to respecting the rule of law, may never be used in practice, amid opposition by some governments.
The newspaper said in an article that the EU’s planned rule-of-law conditions on its next long-term budget have sparked a crisis that risks delaying the adoption of the bloc’s EUR 1.8 trillion pandemic recovery package by the end of the year.
The FT reported that Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of the fiercest critics of the rule-of-law mechanism, has portrayed the measure as a politically motivated and illegal attempt to punish his government by withholding funds.
Poland has warned it could veto the bloc’s 2021-2027 budget if access to EU funds is linked to respect for the rule of law.
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki this month told EU leaders his country opposed the use of “non-objective criteria” to decide how much cash member states receive from Brussels, according to a spokesman.
Morawiecki earlier said in a letter to the bloc's leaders that his country could not accept a mechanism of this kind because it was based on “arbitrary and politically motivated criteria.”
He argued that such a system “could lead to sanctioning the application of double standards and different treatment of individual EU member states.”
Morawiecki's letter came after negotiators from the European Parliament and the German presidency of the EU this month reached an agreement on the rule of law mechanism for the bloc’s 2021-2027 budget, a push that has met with criticism from Poland and Hungary, Poland’s PAP news agency reported.
In December 2017, the European Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, took the unprecedented step of triggering Article 7 of the EU Treaty against Poland, stepping up pressure on Warsaw over contested judicial reforms.
Poland and Hungary have denied EU accusations of violating democratic principles and undermining the independence of their courts.
Most Poles are against the idea of linking access to EU funds to respect for the rule of law, a recent survey has found.
(gs/pk)
Source: tvp.info, newsweek.com