Meeting with reporters to share the news, Ziobro said "extensive legal analysis" had shown “beyond the slightest doubt” that the EU mechanism was “radically at odds” with the Polish constitution.
“And so I decided to put the conditionality regulation today to the scrutiny of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal,” he announced.
Ziobro said the European rule-of-law tool was incompatible with “both the letter and the spirit of EU treaties and the Polish constitution.”
He argued that EU bodies "have decided to overstep their powers in this way."
He told reporters that the rule-of-law conditionality mechanism "is by its nature very dangerous” because "it allows the European Commission to exercise blackmail or even enormous economic violence, for political, arbitrary reasons, and outside any control."
The mechanism, which ties access to EU funds to compliance with rule-of-law principles, was agreed by negotiators from the European Parliament and the German presidency of the EU in November last year and then approved by the ambassadors of the member states, the PAP news agency reported.
The push met with criticism at the time from Poland and Hungary, with Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki sending a letter to EU leaders to oppose “arbitrary and politically motivated criteria.”
Following negotiations, EU leaders finally approved the mechanism at a summit in Brussels in December last year.
Ziobro on Wednesday accused Brussels of seeking to "incapacitate Poland and Polish democracy” after the European Commission launched legal proceedings against Warsaw for questioning the primacy of EU law.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP