Poles launch Facebook campaign in court reform battle

Tens of thousands of Poles took to Facebook to support the country's top court in a constitutional battle against the right-wing government.
The EU country has been mired in crisis over a government bid to change how the Constitutional Court reaches its decisions, in a move that has sparked outrage at home and abroad.
A new law raised the bar needed for court rulings from a simple majority to a two-thirds majority of justices, while also requiring 13 judges to be present for the most contentious cases instead of nine as before.
But the court itself on Wednesday struck down the ruling as unconstitutional, pitting it against the government led by the Law and Justice (PiS) Party, which dismissed its judgement.

Nearly 54,000 users shared the constitutional court verdict on a dedicated Facebook site in the 24 hours after it was handed down.
The campaign urged Prime Minister Beata Szydlo to publish the verdict in Poland's Journal of Laws, a move that would render it binding.

With public anger growing, an impromptu street protest attracted around a thousand people, including opposition party members, yesterday evening outside the cabinet office in Warsaw.
Protesters used a projector to light up the building's facade with a copy of the Polish constitution. A day earlier they did the same with a copy of the verdict.

"A government that ignores court rulings, is quite simply undemocratic. It's putting itself above the constitution," Warsaw resident Magdalena Mikula-Mayer, 39, told AFP.
Szydlo had dismissed the verdict even before it was delivered, saying: "The statement that will be delivered by some of the judges of the Constitutional Court will not be a verdict in the legal sense of the term."
Foreign Minister Witold Waszczykowski yesterday likened the top court's Chief Justice Andrzej Rzeplinski, a respected jurist who handed down the ruling, to an "Iranian ayatollah".
The government's refusal to abide by the judgement has set Poland on a collision course with the European Union, which launched an investigation into the reforms in January.