Length of proceedings The Polish court system is considered to be slow, particularly the common courts. In 2023, it took an average of just under 6 months for an average case to be processed in a regional court and about 10 months in a district court, with the time needed to process a case gradually rising since 2013. Longer proceedings are generally concentrated in the courts centred around larger cities; as of 2017, about 10% of cases required more than a year for resolution (with as much as 18.72% in Warsaw) and more than 1% of cases needed more than 3 years (of which almost 4% in Warsaw). The type of case is also a factor: in 2023, criminal trials in regional courts were on average finished in six months for felonies and three months for petty crimes, but litigation in labour law took almost a year on average to resolve, and adjudication of commercial disputes was even slower. This problem was also noted by the
United States Department of State and by the
World Justice Project, which assigned the lowest grade to the timeliness of civil proceedings, which not only was behind other European countries but also much below the world average score. In criminal proceedings, the situation was still assessed as somewhat worse compared to its peers but was much better than in civil cases. In 2013, the
Centre for Public Opinion Research (CBOS), a state-run pollster, found that by far the most common complaint about the Polish justice system was the length of court proceedings. On the other hand, the criminal cases and the voivodeship administrative courts are often quicker than the median among the Council of Europe members. The ECHR ruled in 2015 in
Rutkowski et al. v. Poland that Poland offered inadequate protections for parties who suffer from long court proceedings, some of which have been dragged for years, despite a law, itself created after as a result of another ECHR case, theoretically aiming to address the problem. The Constitutional Tribunal wrote in the reasonings of a 2011 case that a civil lawsuit was "expensive and long", and the vice-minister of justice said the same in 2014. The length of proceedings caused cases such as the murder of
Grzegorz Przemyk by Communist authorities in 1983 to be closed inconclusively as the indictments went past the
prescriptive period. According to a 2020 survey of Polish lawyers and
attorneys at law, 95.8% of those professionals said that the excessive length of proceedings had a systemic character; they also said that problems occurred both on the judicial and the prosecutorial side. Various reasons were suggested for those problems. Some were complaining about excessive caseloads (14.67 million cases per year for fewer than 10,000 judges) others blamed delays in requesting and delivering opinions of expert witnesses, while the , a think tank, suggested that an excess of managerial positions distracting from adjudication of cases was at fault. At the same time, most lawyers were afraid to make complaints about inadequate speed of processing the case for fear of angering the judge, and only 12% believed that this tool was effective.
Lack of popular support and trust The trust in the judicial system among the general population is low. A large slump in the trust in the court system happened in 1998–2007, as people did not see the court system as impartial. Krystyna Daniel connected this slump to the general distrust of statutes and government organs, lengthy proceedings and media criticism (mostly around controversial court cases or irregularities in the judiciary). A particular plunge in support for the courts occurred in 2012, Only 25% approve of the current state of the judiciary, compared with 48% of negative voices, according to a September 2025 poll made by CBOS. The support for the courts has been oscillating around 30% since 2009, with little variation across party preferences. As for the Constitutional Tribunal, disapproval spiked following the
2015 crisis and further went up following its
ruling restricting abortion, but criticism is concentrated among voters who are left-leaning, less religious and opposing the Law and Justice (PiS) party. The diminution of trust in the Tribunal, along with worsening efficiency, is widely considered to be the reason behind lower numbers of constitutional law verdicts since 2015 and requests for legal guidance from the courts. In December 2021, CBOS found that 46% of people preferred to resolve cases informally by non-judicial means, which number steadily increased since 2014 and approached values experienced in the communist
Polish People's Republic; only 38% declared that the judiciary was better equipped to do that. The 2025 European Union Rule of Law report notes that only 26% of the general population and 24% of companies have a good opinion of the independence of the court system.
Changes to the courts pushed by Law and Justice did not seem to improve the perception of them and were not popular among the general electorate. According to a
Rzeczpospolita poll in May 2022, only 14.2% of people approved the reform, compared to 53.6% of those who opposed it. Another poll, in December 2021, found that over 69% of people thought that the reform did not increase confidence in the courts.
Other issues Some of the Polish courts have seen signs of
nepotism, e.g. favouritism during competition for judge positions and in salaries. These problems have also plagued the National Council of the Judiciary, which prompted the Supreme Court to annul some of its recommendations. That said, before 2015, the extent of corruption in Polish courts was not considered to be large, but it worsened in subsequent years as political forces started to assert more influence on the judiciary. Another issue of concern is the usage of the so-called , whereby a suspect is held in repeatedly prolonged detention in order to be compelled either to
confess or to
testify against other defendants, a practice officially illegal nevertheless still undertaken under formal disguise of various pretexts such as safeguarding the undistorted course of a proceeding; the Helsinki Foundation of Human Rights noted that an average pretrial detention lasted for more than a year and, in its opinion, was overused relative to the less invasive preventative measures such as bail and police supervision. and the excessive reliance on the letter of the law (
lex) rather than the law itself (
ius) are also noted as problems within the Polish judiciary. The Polish courts have also been severely impacted by the
COVID-19 pandemic, in particular as related to the access to the justice system. The pandemic forced the courts to increasingly digitise its so far underused and inconsistently applied computer systems aiding decision-making, documentation and hearings; however, many documents are still being processed on paper and sent by post.
Rule of law concerns When PiS took power in 2015, the party stated that it wanted to rid the judiciary of
Communist legacy and root out corrupt judges. It also promised to remedy long-standing problems of slowness and red tape, which the media favourable to that party portrayed as evidence that judges are out-of-touch and self-interested. They met in particular with the disapproval of the European Union authorities, which initiated
Article 7 proceedings against a member state for the first time. The
rule-of-law crisis in Hungary and Poland served as a trigger for adopting the EU's
conditionality mechanism, which may deny the receipt of EU budget funds if the rule of law deficiencies prevent a proper implementation of the EU budget, and led to a since-lifted suspension of
Next Generation EU funds allocated for Poland. The European Parliament has pressed the
European Commission to act on the breaches of the independence of the judiciary. It even filed a lawsuit against the commission for what it said was an inadequate response to the violations, but later dropped it.
Capture of the Constitutional Tribunal The Constitutional Tribunal (TK), like other courts with appointments made by political bodies, experienced some form of bias in rulings, but it was not very different from the situation in the analogical institutions in other countries. Since 2015, however, the TK has been stuffed with appointees favourable to the Law and Justice party, including former politicians of PiS or friends of its leaders, leading scholars to see it as captured by the party's interests. The European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice both ruled that the Tribunal, when ruling with the so-called doubling judges ('''') instead of those whose term started before the term of the 2015–2019 parliament was set to constitute, violated the
right to a fair trial as it was an improperly constituted court. The Constitutional Tribunal delivered rulings aiming to insulate the justice system from external scrutiny. It argued in one case that ECHR had no jurisdiction to control the appointment of its own justices by asserting it was not a court within the meaning of the European Convention on Human Rights (described by
Ewa Łętowska and Wojciech Tumidalski to be the Tribunal's "
coming out") and then by expanding the ruling on the court system as a whole. As a result, the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs told two people who won in the ECHR that they would not be paid compensations as the ministry argued that the Constitutional Tribunal's ruling forbade it from doing so. The Tribunal also asserted that the
treaties of the European Union were incompatible with the Polish Constitution insofar as they allowed the courts to question the appointments by partisan-controlled KRS or the President, aiming to thwart the application of ECJ's unfavourable judgments about the Polish judiciary and forcing it not to comply with ECJ's orders. This ruling sparked massive protests and raised concerns about
Polexit. The ECJ found that the Tribunal's rejection of EU treaties was invalid, and the court could not be considered as impartial. It said that the Tribunal's rulings severely undermined the principle of
primacy of European Union law and effectively denied protections afforded to residents of Poland under these laws, in particular as related to guarantees of an independent judiciary. In response to the verdict, the Tribunal again insisted that it was not bound by European Union laws. When the government changed to the Law and Justice's opponents under
Donald Tusk, the Tribunal repeatedly sought to make it harder for the new ruling coalition to implement its agenda. Attempts to break the impasse were derailed by presidents supported by PiS, who approve of the changes to the judiciary. and then passed budgets without any provision for salaries for members of the Constitutional Tribunal and the National Council of the Judiciary. The Tribunal asserted that the deprivation of salaries was unconstitutional, but the government refused to publish their ruling or comply with it.
Undue influence on judges The problem of undue influence of judges in Poland has existed for some time. A
sting operation by
Gazeta Polska Codziennie triggered a
political scandal in 2012 by exposing the fact that a judge of a court in Gdańsk acquiesced easily to procedural demands made in relation to a particular case during a phone call by a journalist pretending to be a senior officer of the
Chancellery of the Prime Minister. The judge, Ryszard Milewski, was disciplined for that violation and sent to a
Białystok court. Since the reform of common courts and the Supreme Court started in 2017, the judges almost unanimously expressed concern about worsening judicial independence, fearing retribution for criticism of the new laws. Some of the most vocal
opponents of the changes to the judiciary were targeted by the state prosecution, and disciplinary proceedings were abused in an attempt to silence critics who, for example, sent preliminary requests to the European Court of Justice asking to assess judicial independence. There were also cases of judges being submitted to disciplinary action after issuing a ruling in opposition to the party's interest or demands of the prosecutor in the particular case. In addition to that, a change to the statutes regulating the courts (often called the "muzzle law") made it an offence to question the validity of appointments of judges by fellow judges, in essence those appointed by a partisan-controlled National Council of the Judiciary, even if there were legitimate concerns about them. This statute was criticised by the Venice Commission for violating the judicial independence and severely limiting the judges'
freedom of speech. The 2021 rule of law report by the European Commission said that the mere prospect of being prosecuted in a judicial body having no guarantees of independence had created a
chilling effect for judges.
Rzeczpospolita also reported that the catalogue of offences after which disciplinary proceedings are initiated broadens, some of which are not related to the functioning of the court, like
speeding and
driving under the influence. Debates are ongoing.
Partisan control of the National Council of the Judiciary An overhaul of the National Council of the Judiciary happened in late 2017, when the law came into effect that granted the Sejm powers to appoint 15 members of the judiciary (ruled legal by the Constitutional Tribunal in 2019); at the same time, the Tribunal ordered the judges on the council to be appointed for a collective term, rather than individually, as had been the case earlier. Both changes were very controversial. All judges that had served on the council were dismissed on 6 March 2018 without regard to their terms and substituted with judges favourable to PiS. The consensus of scholars is that a change to the term of some of the KRS's members ran afoul of the Constitution, though Mateusz Radajewski wrote that the Tribunal left the lawmakers with no better choice. In September and October 2018, the Supreme Administrative Court ordered a halt on Council's appointments to the Supreme Court to three of the five chambers, but the President ignored the NSA's order. The top administrative court later annulled around a dozen recommendations for appointment of new judges of the Supreme Court due to concerns about the lack of independence of the council. The
Venice Commission urged not to approve the politicisation of the KRS, while numerous scholars, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and the
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) questioned the independence or the constitutionality and thus the validity of nominations made by the partisan-controlled KRS (called "neo-KRS" by its critics, and its appointees as "neo-judges", '
). One of the most controversial changes was the creation of a disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court, whose members were all nominated by the new iteration of the KRS, and which some have compared to the Star Chamber or to an extraordinary court ('), which may not be created in peacetime. Due to the lack of impartiality, the National Council of the Judiciary was expelled from the European Network of Judiciary Councils, and major legal and judicial organisations in Poland, as well as former Council members, asked to boycott the 2022 nomination procedure. Given the doubts about the validity of the new KRS as well as other laws concerning the common courts and the judiciary, several courts have made preliminary requests to the ECJ about the overhaul of the judiciary or issued rulings aiming to resist the changes. The Supreme Court declared the two new chambers, the Disciplinary and that of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs, illegal, and found the new KRS "systemically not independent of political interest". While this was promptly overturned by the Constitutional Tribunal, arguing that
European law was not above the Polish Constitution, the consensus of scholars was that the Tribunal
exceeded its competences as it could not assess the constitutionality of the Supreme Court's resolutions. In addition to that, several judges and lawyers sued in the ECHR to declare the Supreme Court chambers, with the controlling majority being appointed by the new body, to be incompatible with the European Convention of Human Rights, and thus invalidate its rulings. The
Strasbourg court agreed, declaring the Disciplinary Chamber, the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs and the Civil Chamber not to be
independent and impartial tribunals established by law. The courts have numerous problems with determining the proper way with dealing with requests for the judge to
recuse, including whether recusal is mandated if the only reason for recusal is being appointed by the new KRS. Courts have seen contradictory rulings in this respect and there even has been a ruling allowing recusal of judges who themselves process a recusal request. Donald Tusk's government decided to publish all rulings of "new" judges with a preceding note listing ECHR and ECJ's rulings that question the impartiality and the correctness of the judges' nomination process. and almost half of lay judges of the Supreme Court refused to work with newly appointed judges due to their conviction that any such proceeding will be necessarily invalid; and some decided not to send the requests to delay mandatory retirement to the KRS because they do not recognise it as a properly constituted body. Their position is supported by the June 2022 legal principle of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court, which reiterated that the partisan KRS "is not equivalent to the constitutional organ [regulated] by article 187 paragraph 1 [of the Constitution]" and ruled that newly appointed Supreme Court judges must resign. Three years later, the same chamber, and separately the Labour and Social Security chambers invalidated legal principles of the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs as they argued that a panel that included "neo-judges" was not a proper court. However, just after that, the latter two chambers reversed that legal principle and echoed the Constitutional Tribunal by asserting that no outside bodies can interfere with Supreme Court rulings, including those of the European Union; the head of the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs claimed that the ruling was actually pro-European.
Arbitrary secondment of judges The minister of justice, according to law, may second (
delegować) a judge to a lower or, in some circumstances, to the higher courts and to the Ministry of Justice. The minister may also second a judge to administrative courts, the
Chancellery of the President, to the Supreme Court or to an institution subordinate to the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs upon the requests of the leaders of these agencies. However, the law does not require that the decisions of secondment, or the revocation thereof, have justifications. the Polish Ombudsman also argued that the unlimited powers in issuing delegations ran afoul of several articles of the Constitution, including by infringement on the President's prerogative to appoint judges to the positions the President decides.
Repercussions in Poland and abroad The judicial reforms have been met with fierce resistance from the judiciary, including the rank-and-file judges. For example, the Polish Bar and its leadership, the , reject the validity of judgments by the suspended disciplinary chamber of the Supreme Court. Numerous protests were started against the reforms. They were also initiated abroad in front of Polish diplomatic institutions. The rule of law crisis has prompted several courts to temporarily cease honouring the
European Arrest Warrants from Poland, including courts in the
Netherlands,
Germany,
Ireland,
Slovakia and
Spain. However, the ECJ ruled that the courts may not do so unless there are reasonable doubts as to the possibility of getting a fair trial in Poland. The European Court of Justice found Poland to be in
contempt of court for delaying the disbandment of the Disciplinary Chamber, which ultimately cost the country €320 million. The ECJ's ruling about grave violations of EU law by the Constitutional Tribunal is also likely to trigger fines unless the issue is promptly fixed. ==See also==