The case boils down to moves by Tusk’s pro-EU administration to reject decisions by some judges appointed under the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) administration that led Poland’s government from 2015 to 2023.
The Giżycko judge ruled that the couple’s original divorce judgment was legally “non-existent” because it had been signed off by one of the “neo-judges” appointed under reforms designed by previous Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro.
EU courts later ruled that Ziobro’s overhaul had undermined judicial independence, leaving Tusk’s government grappling with how to dismantle the system without undermining legal certainty.
It’s unclear how many similar rulings may exist across Poland, but the scale is vast. The country records around 57,000 divorces a year, and tens of thousands of routine cases, including divorces, may have been decided by judges appointed under the disputed system.
Kinga Skawińska-Pożyczka, a lawyer at Warsaw-based firm Dubois i Wspólnicy, said the decision was flawed and should be overturned on appeal, arguing that a court handling a property dispute should not have questioned the validity of a final divorce ruling. “The Giżycko ruling should be treated as an exception, not a rule,” she said.
But others warned that even isolated rulings can have wider consequences. “A system that starts mass-questioning its own rulings stops being a system,” said Bartosz Stasik, a Wrocław-based lawyer. “Nobody wants to be the one to tell thousands of people their divorces, inheritances or verdicts don’t exist — but every avalanche starts with a single stone.”