The issue centers on actions by Tusk’s pro-EU administration to reject judgments made by some judges appointed during the tenure of the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party, which governed Poland from 2015 to 2023.
A Giżycko judge declared the couple’s initial divorce judgment legally “non-existent” because it was approved by one of the “neo-judges” appointed under reforms introduced by former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro.
EU courts later determined that Ziobro’s reforms compromised judicial independence, posing a challenge for Tusk’s government to dismantle the system without compromising legal certainty.
The extent of similar rulings in Poland is uncertain, but the scale is substantial. The country handles approximately 57,000 divorces annually, and numerous routine cases, including divorces, might have been decided by judges appointed under the contentious system.
Kinga Skawińska-Pożyczka, a lawyer at the Warsaw firm Dubois i Wspólnicy, criticized the decision as flawed and argued for its reversal on appeal, stating a court dealing with a property dispute should not challenge the validity of a final divorce judgment. “The Giżycko ruling should be viewed as an exception, not a precedent,” she asserted.
Others cautioned that even isolated decisions could have broader implications. “A system that begins mass-questioning its own rulings ceases to be a system,” said Bartosz Stasik, a lawyer from Wrocław. “Nobody wants to tell thousands of people their divorces, inheritances, or judgments are invalid — but every avalanche starts with a single stone.”
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