Polish Supreme Court asks EU court about jurisdiction in ZDF series case

The case concerned the German public broadcaster ZDF's wartime drama "Our Mothers, Our Fathers" ("Unsere Mütter, unsere Väter"). A Polish veteran of the Home Army (AK, the wartime resistance) and a veterans' association argued that the series portrayed the Home Army in a way that violated their personal rights. They sued in Poland.

The Kraków appeals court ordered ZDF to apologise but refused to award compensation. The dispute then reached the Polish Supreme Court, which had to decide whether Polish courts could hear a claim for the full damage caused by a broadcast shown in several EU countries, both on television and online.

In March 2025 the Supreme Court paused the proceedings and referred the question to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the EU's top court. The case was registered as C-232/25. The question was whether the claimants could sue in Poland, as the courts of their "centre of interests", for all the damage under the EU's Brussels I rules on jurisdiction in civil cases. The answer mattered for people who want to sue foreign media in their home courts, and for how far those courts can reach across borders.