The Senate adopted the so -called incidental act on Wednesday without amendments. According to it, the validity of the presidential election in 2025 is to decide 15 the oldest judges in the Supreme Court. Currently, the chamber of the Extraordinary Supreme Court is designated to approve the president's election. The president will decide about the fate of the act.
49 senators voted in favor of the act, 31 were against, three abstained. Earlier, the Senate did not accept the application of PiS senators to reject the act in its entirety.
The main assumption of the so -called Incidental Act, which the Sejm adopted on January 24, “about special solutions in the field of recognizing by the Supreme Court matters related to the elections of the President of the Republic of Poland and supplementary elections to the Senate of the Republic of Poland, ordered in 2025” is that the validity of the election of the president is to be adjudicated by 15 oldest judges service as a Supreme Court judge.
In addition, election protests and matters in which appeal measures have been submitted to the resolutions of the PKW to consider a three -person judges, drawn from among these 15 judges. In the event that two or more judges have the same period of service as a SN judge, priority to sit in the composition is to have a judge with a longer internship of all his judicial service.
Currently – in accordance with the Act on the Supreme Court amended during PiS rule – the issue of the president's election is decided by the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs. Her status – due to the so -called Neosędziów, i.e. judges selected by the National Council of the Judiciary after 2017 – is questioned, among others by the current authorities, which refer to the case law of the CJEU and ECtHR in this case. The incidental act is to solve this problem so that the determination of the validity of the election of the president does not raise doubts.
The incidental act will go to the president
So -called The incidental act will now go to the desk of President Andrzej Duda. The head of the Chancellery of President Małgorzata Paprocka, asked at the end of January whether the president would sign her, said that she was not a supporter of electoral engineering just before the election. She added that it was on his initiative that the Chamber of Extraordinary and Public Affairs of the Supreme Court was created.
The problem of establishing the SN's control by the President's election has recently caused a dispute around the activities of the State Electoral Commission and the Control Chamber regarding the financial statements of the PiS election committee from parliamentary elections in 2023. Therefore, in December, the draft law was proposed by Sejm Marshal Szymon Hołownia, but he predicted that three combined chambers of the Supreme Court were to be determined on the validity of the election of the president: criminal, civil and work and social security.
The problem of the proposal of Hołownia, which raised some lawyers, including some Supreme Court judges, was that in the connected SN chambers, the so -called NeoSziego, hence the PSL-TD club reported the amendment adopted by the Sejm, so that the validity of the president's election in 2025 would rule 15 judges of the oldest seniority in the Supreme Court, and thus appointed not by the National Court Register after 2017.
Source of the main photo: Shutterstock