Lower house amends law on Supreme Court

Poland's Sejm (lower house) on Thursday adopted a draft amendment to the law on the Supreme Court (SN) under which extraordinary appeals against court verdicts to the top court will be filed only by the Prosecutor General and the National Ombudsman. There were 234 votes for the amended law, 200 against and two abstentions. Currently, complaints can also be filed by the Children's Ombudsman, the Patients' Ombudsman, the head of the Polish Financial Supervision Commission, the Financial Ombudsman and the head of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection. In its justification for the amendment, PiS explained that narrowing down the number of agencies entitled to file extraordinary complaints was to underscore the special character of the complaint, which enables the revision of all verdicts passed by lower courts in the past 20 years. The current Supreme Court laws were passed on Dec. 8, 2017, and came into force on April 3 this year.