Poland's Unhappy Place in the Middle

inThe European Union executive on Wednesday warned Poland to halt controversial supreme court reforms that threaten judicial independence or else face unprecedented sanctions by the bloc.
After a meeting of the European Commission in Brussels, commissioners threatened to sanction Poland and suspend its voting rights in the Council of Ministers, a top EU decision making body.
"Recent measures taken by the Polish authorities on the judicial system greatly amplify the threat to the rule of law in Poland," European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans said.
Read more: What are the Polish court reforms
"If implemented in their current form, these laws would have a very significant negative impact on the independence of the judiciary and would increase the systemic threat to the rule of law in Poland," he added.
Timmermans said the proposed content of the draft laws and the voting process are still incomplete so the Commission could not make a formal decision yet, but that "we are getting close to triggering Article 7." sert quote here

The ruling party has already been condemned by the European Union for stacking loyalists onto the Constitutional Tribunal, which screens legislation for accordance with the national constitution. After winning the 2015 election, the PiS changed the way the court operates - including the order in which cases are heard and how the chief justice is chosen - and has put forward its own judges instead of those approved by the previous parliament.
The party argues that the changes are necessary to destroy the vestiges of communist power inherent in the justice system. Authoritarian PiS party founder Jaroslaw Kaczynski - himself a trained lawyer - believes that Poland's court system is still a "stronghold of post-communists."
It is indeed true that judges were one of the few occupational groups responsible for maintaining the communist state whose backgrounds were not closely examined after 1989 but many fear the reforms would strip the whole justice system of its independence.

The Russian government has warned Poland that it will face sanctions if it removes monuments glorifying the Soviet victory in World War Two.
Last month Poland updated its "de-communisation" legislation, banning "totalitarian" symbols, which would include Soviet propaganda monuments.
Now Russian foreign ministry officials have warned of "asymmetric measures" if Poland removes Soviet war monuments.
Russia could refuse visas for Polish officials or downgrade trade relations.
The officials, quoted by the Russian daily Izvestia, were not named.
The Red Army's defeat of Nazi German forces on Polish soil in 1944-1945 remains a thorny issue in Russian-Polish relations.
Many Poles viewed the Red Army as an occupation force, not as liberators, as the 1939 Nazi-Soviet pact had carved up Poland between two dictatorships.
The Russian foreign ministry has also expressed anger at Poland's decision to exclude Russia from an international project to build a museum at Sobibor, site of a notorious Nazi death camp.
The ministry said Russia had been invited to join the project in 2013, but this month it was told that the Polish government wanted to keep the original group involved, from Poland, Israel, the Netherlands and Slovakia.
The ministry accused Poland of "Russophobia" and of "striving to belittle the USSR's role as liberator". In 1943 a Soviet Jewish prisoner-of-war, Lt Alexander Pechersky, led a desperate uprising against the Nazi SS corps by Jewish inmates at Sobibor.