As a sign of the importance given to the case, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has, for the first time, broadcast live on its website the reading of its decision, Wednesday February 16, at 9:30 a.m. The judges of Luxembourg knew their awaited judgment, whereas the future of the mechanism of conditionality of the payment of the community funds to the respect of the rule of law was played out there.
The Court rejected “in their entirety” the actions for annulment of this regulation that Poland and Hungary had brought. It thus validated, without reservation, this new mechanism, which allows the Commission to deprive of Community money a country where violations of the rule of law have been observed which “harms or threatens to harm” to the financial interests of the EU “in a sufficiently direct manner”.
During negotiations between the Twenty-Seven on the European recovery plan of 750 billion euros and the 2021-2027 budget of 1,070 billion euros, in the summer of 2020, several countries, including the Netherlands, had makes this conditionality mechanism a sine qua non for their support. Warsaw and Budapest, for their part, had threatened to block the entire budget package if it were adopted. They finally changed their minds, after having obtained from their partners the commitment that the Commission would not use it until the CJEU had ruled.
Poland and Hungary are among the main beneficiaries of European funds and, from this point of view, this regulation which has just been validated by the CJEU could be very harmful to them. Within the framework of the multiannual budget, Warsaw must receive more than 110 billion euros and Budapest more than 35 billion euros between 2021 and 2027. As for the recovery plan, it reserves aid for them respectively of 23.9 billion and 7 .2 billion euros, but so far they have not received a single euro. Beforehand, the Commission demands that the Prime Minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, initiate a reform of the Polish justice system, now in the pay of power, and that his Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orban, tackle corruption, which has become endemic.
The European Parliament is getting impatient
The Commission “will carefully analyze the motivations” judges, reacted its president, Ursula von der Leyen, who does not seem in a hurry to act. The community executive should publish ” guiding lines “ of the regulations – a kind of instructions – on March 2 and, above all, to decide by then what use he intends to make of them. Knowing that, once he decides to launch hostilities, it will take another six to nine months before the procedure is completed.
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