Court of Justice of the European Union

The European Commission has issued four reasoned opinions to Bulgaria, marking the final stage before potentially referring the country to the Court of Justice of the European Union. These opinions highlight significant areas where Bulgaria has yet to align with EU regulations.

But if Morawiecki believed the sense of unity coursing through the EU might move Brussels to release 36 billion euros in frozen post-pandemic recovery cash, he was wrong.

Given both Poland and Hungary are the two member states deemed to be the worst offenders, governments of those two countries challenged the mechanism before the CJEU in 2021, arguing that it lacked a proper legal basis in the EU Treaties.

The targets of this tool are, of course, the illiberal governments of Central Europe, with European institutions gradually losing patience with the blatant attempts by the nationalist-populist Hungarian and Polish governing parties to undermine the fundamental values upon which the EU is based.

The heightened tension between Brussels and Warsaw followed the Polish Constitutional Tribunal's ruling on October 7 that key articles of EU Treaties were incompatible with the Polish constitution.

Like all 27 EU member states, Poland accepted the supremacy of EU Treaties when it joined back in 2004. Those basic tenets have not changed since. What did change, however, is that, of late, rulings handed down by the CJEU have begun interfering with the Polish government's takeover of the judiciary - a process which has been happening since 2015.

The Constitutional Court of Romania (CCR) rejected today several constitutional challenges to Law No. 304/2004 on judicial organization and also unanimously quashed challenges to several articles in OUG No. 90/2018 on specific measures for rendering operational the Section for the Investigation of Judicial Crimes (SIIJ).

Poland's battered judiciary scored a small but important victory on Tuesday, when Warsaw district court judge Igor Tuleya "survived" a hearing before the Disciplinary Chamber of the Supreme Court.

Experts called it a significant win in the struggle raging over ultimate political control of the Polish judiciary, in which Tuleya is seen as one of the most prominent independent figures.

The European Commission is pressuring the government to sort out state nickel producer Larco, either through its privatization or its closure: Brussels has again referred Greece to the European Court of Justice, demanding a huge fine for the non-implementation of the same court's decision on illegal state subsidies to the mining company since 2017.

The supreme national courts are the domestic source of legal authority. This absolute authority of theirs was, though, challenged upon the formation of the autonomous legal entity of the European Union, guaranteed by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).