Businesses face a moderate to high corruption risk when dealing with the judiciary. Bribes and irregular payments in return for favorable judicial decisions are fairly uncommon (GCR 2015-2016). Almost one-quarter of citizens believe bribery and abuse of office are widespread in the courts (European Commission, Feb. 2014). However, in contrast to the lower courts, the public generally expresses very high confidence in the Constitutional Tribunal (BTI 2016). Two out of five businesses perceive the independence of the judiciary to be fairly or very bad (JS 2017). A third of judges believe some appointments and promotions in the judiciary are made on basis other than merit or experience (ENCJ 2017). Companies express strong dissatisfaction with the efficiency of the legal framework pertaining to settling disputes and challenging regulations (GCR 2017-2018). Some of the main problems in the judiciary are delays in adjudicating cases, lengthy pretrial detention periods and corruption investigations that move slowly (BTI 2016). Companies complain of over-regulation, over-burdened courts and prosecutors, and burdensome bureaucratic processes (ICS 2017). Foreign companies generally rely on a third-country court or offshore arbitration to settle legal matters (ICS 2017). Foreign arbitration is generally recognized in Poland, but there are many exceptions; delays in recognition are mainly due to the lack of specialized judges in specific commercial matters (ICS 2017). Enforcing a contract in Poland takes longer than elsewhere in the OECD (DB 2018).
In 2017, the Polish parliament passed a set of bills that would have effectively brought the Supreme Court under the control of the ruling party by removing all judges of the court except for those chosen by the justice minister and by allowing parliament to appoint members of the National Council of the Judiciary (The Guardian, Jul. 2017). After mass protests, Poland’s President vetoed the measures (The Guardian, Jul. 2017).
Poland is a party to four international agreements for dispute resolution: the Geneva Protocol on Arbitration Clauses, the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (UNCITRAL), the Geneva European Convention on International Trade Arbitration and the Moscow Convention on Arbitration Resolution of Civil Law Disputes in Economic and Scientific Cooperation.