Every democracy runs on a strange trust: the people who hold power agree, in advance, that a court can tell them "no." It works until the people in power decide they'd rather the court couldn't.
In the last decade, three governments, in three countries with almost nothing else in common, tried some version of the same move: change the rules that let courts check them. Each attempt met a different kind of resistance, and so far, each one has ended, or is still ending, differently.
Israel: the court struck down the law that limited the court
In July 2023, Israel's parliament, the Knesset, passed an amendment to Basic Law: The Judiciary, one of the quasi-constitutional laws that function as Israel's closest equivalent to a written constitution. The amendment removed the courts' ability to strike down government and ministerial decisions on the grounds that they were "extremely unreasonable," a legal standard courts had used months earlier to block Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's appointment of Aryeh Deri, a coalition party leader with a prior tax-offense conviction, as a government minister.
The law's supporters argued elected officials, not unelected judges, should have the final word on decisions like that. Opponents argued it removed one of the only real checks on the government between elections, and hundreds of thousands of people protested weekly for most of 2023, until the war that began in October pushed the issue off the public stage.
It came back on January 1, 2024. In an 8-7 ruling led by Chief Justice Esther Hayut, Israel's Supreme Court struck down the amendment, the first time in the country's history that the Court had annulled a Basic Law. Almost as significant as the outcome: 12 of the 15 justices agreed, as a matter of principle, that the Court does have the authority to strike down a Basic Law in extreme cases, a power it had never previously exercised or fully confirmed it held.
What makes the Israeli case distinct from the other two: there was no outside authority involved at any point. Israel answers to no supranational court or federation. The confrontation was resolved entirely inside the domestic system, one branch of Israeli government checking another, with no external actor able to apply pressure either way.
Poland: an outside court got involved, and money got frozen
Between 2015 and 2023, Poland's governing Law and Justice party lowered the retirement age for Supreme Court judges (pushing out sitting judges before their terms were up), created a new disciplinary chamber with power over ordinary judges, and gave the government more influence over judicial appointments.
Poland, unlike Israel, belongs to the European Union, and the EU has its own legal tools for exactly this situation. In December 2017, the European Commission triggered Article 7 of the EU Treaty against Poland, a rarely used mechanism for member states seen as risking the EU's core values. Article 7 requires unanimous agreement among the other member states to actually impose sanctions, and Hungary made clear early on it would block any vote against Poland, so Article 7 alone never bit.
What did bite was a second track: the EU's own Court of Justice (CJEU) took up individual pieces of the Polish reforms as ordinary legal violations, not political ones. It ordered an emergency suspension of the forced-retirement rule for Supreme Court judges while the case was pending. Separately, after ruling that Poland's disciplinary chamber violated judicial independence, the EU withheld funding from Poland as a financial penalty for non-compliance.
The turning point wasn't a single ruling, it was an election. In December 2023, Poland's government changed, and the new administration under Donald Tusk announced it would restore judicial independence. By 2024, the EU had released Poland's remaining frozen funds and formally closed the Article 7 process against it, holding it up as one of the rule-of-law framework's rare success stories.
Hungary: the same tools, no resolution yet
Hungary, under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, followed a similar arc to Poland's, and hit the same Article 7 mechanism in 2018, but the ending, so far, is different: there isn't one.
The EU introduced a newer financial tool in 2022, a "conditionality" regulation that lets it freeze funding tied directly to specific rule-of-law reforms, without needing the unanimous vote Article 7 requires. Under it, Brussels froze billions of euros in EU funds owed to Hungary, part of it tied specifically to judicial-independence milestones the government hadn't met.
In late 2023, the Commission released 10.2 billion euros to Hungary anyway, a decision widely reported as timed to remove Hungary's leverage to veto a separate EU vote on aid to Ukraine, even though the underlying judicial reforms still hadn't fully happened. Billions more remained frozen, and the European Parliament went on to sue the Commission over the release, arguing the conditions for it had not been met.
Unlike Poland, there's been no change of government in Hungary to reset the dynamic. The financial pressure exists, but without a shift in who holds domestic power, it hasn't produced the outcome it produced next door.
Same move, three different endings
Set side by side, the three cases aren't really a story about whether courts should have this much power or that much. They're a story about what it actually takes to reverse an attempt to weaken judicial checks once it's already happened, and the honest answer looks different depending on what tools a country's system has available.
Israel had no outside authority to appeal to, so the resolution had to come from inside: the same domestic court system whose power was being curtailed ended up being the body that struck the change down. Poland had an outside authority, but the outside pressure alone didn't finish the job, it took a domestic election to actually align the government with what Brussels wanted. Hungary has the same outside authority Poland had, and years of frozen funds to show for it, but without a comparable domestic political shift, the external pressure has mostly just sat there, applied but unresolved.
The pattern that emerges isn't about which country was right. It's that external checks, courts above a court, unions above a state, appear to work only when they eventually connect to something happening inside the country itself. Absent that, they can freeze billions of euros indefinitely without changing anything at all.