Poland Sends Six Repayment Demands to Judges Over Rights-Court Awards

Poland's prosecutor general has sent six demands seeking reimbursement from Supreme Court judges for compensation the state paid following European Court of Human Rights judgments. The action, announced November 6, opens a civil recovery effort; it is not a judgment that the individual judges owe the money or committed a crime.

The National Prosecutor's Office said Waldemar Żurek, acting for the Polish state through the Foreign Ministry, had issued demands connected to six Strasbourg cases in which the court found violations of Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to a fair hearing. The announcement lists groups of judges involved in each case, with joint liability claimed within some panels. Six notices do not mean only six individual judges are affected.

The official statement identifies the cases as Reczkowicz, Dolińska-Ficek and Ozimek, Advance Pharma, Juszczyszyn, Wałęsa and Morawiec. It lists state compensation paid in each case as PLN 70,514.12, PLN 143,302.69, PLN 80,879, PLN 141,930, PLN 131,148 and PLN 118,438.20. These are amounts described as previously paid by the state, not sums recovered from judges.

Adding those six itemised figures gives PLN 686,212.01. A separately reported public statement from Żurek gives PLN 690,650.74 for the first six demands. The PLN 4,438.73 difference has not been reconciled in the documents reviewed; the signed notices and exchange-rate calculations are needed before drawing any inference about its cause.

The legal distinction matters. The Strasbourg judgments addressed Poland's responsibility under the Convention. They did not themselves decide whether each judge named in the Polish repayment demands has personal civil liability to reimburse the Treasury. That question would require the applicable domestic legal process and an opportunity to contest the demands.

Żurek said the state had already paid more than PLN 6.5 million in compensation related to disputed Supreme Court appointments and that the Foreign Ministry had forwarded a list of 108 Strasbourg judgments for consideration. Those broader figures are not the amount sought in the first six notices. The judges' individual responses were not established in the material reviewed.

The next records to obtain are the six signed demands, the conversion method, responses from judges and any civil suits or judgments that follow. The verified new event is the decision to seek repayment, not a successful recovery or finding of individual wrongdoing.