EU court tells Poland to pay €1m a day in judicial dispute

Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki (Ronald Wittek, Pool Photo via AP)

The European Union raised the stakes on Wednesday in a stand-off with Poland over judicial independence and the primacy of EU law, with the bloc’s top court fining Poland one million euros a day to prevent what it called “serious and irreparable harm” to the EU’s legal order and values.

The European Court of Justice imposed the penalty after a week-long war of words in which Poland told the EU to stay out of its judicial affairs while other EU nations insisted that Warsaw could not continue to get huge EU subsidies while disregarding the bloc’s democratic principles at will.