Last weekend, I was on one of the beautiful country walks which abound around Brussels when I received a text message from my president, to say that the head of the Polish delegation to the CCBE and president of the Polish Bar Council, Joanna Agacka-Indecka, had been among the victims of that morning’s fatal plane crash in Smolensk, Russia.Among the many dislocations that death brings, and maybe the lightest, is the sense of life carrying on for you when it has ended for others – of the ability in this case to appreciate the budding trees of spring when elsewhere on the planet there is just horror and grief.

Poland’s legal professions are, surprisingly, constructed rather like our own, although for very different reasons. Poland is the only other country in the EU which has two distinct and independent legal professions, like our solicitor and barrister – except in their case, they are called advocate and legal advisor. This is a carry-over from communist times, when the number of advocates shrank, while many lawyers worked in-house in state-owned industries. When communism ended, there was a small advocates’ profession and a much larger number of legal advisors. Poland has been alone among this group of countries in continuing to have two separate and recognised legal professions with their own professional bodies, both of which are members of the CCBE. All the other former communist countries in the EU have either fused the two or dealt with it in some other way. Joanna Agacka-Indecka was the president of the advocates’ branch.

As is well known, the plane was on its way to commemorate the Katyn massacre during the Second World War, when the Russians killed around 22,000 of the leading members of Polish society. Less well known is that there were many lawyer victims of that massacre. This is part of the horror of recent Polish history, the depth of which we in Britain have difficulty grasping, since we had a much luckier twentieth century (even though we had our own great pains).

Joanna Agacka-Indecka was president of the Polish Bar for three years. She faced a big challenge from the government of the party created and led by the former president and his twin brother (as prime minister), the Law and Justice Party. There was such anxiety about the threat to the rule of law in Poland caused by proposed changes to the law made by this government that, in September 2007, the CCBE and the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute sent a joint fact-finding mission. A report was issued in November 2007, called Justice under Siege which made various recommendations. A follow-up report was issued a year later.

In brief, there was concern that the government had embarked on a campaign to gain control over the entire justice system, without proper regard for constitutional limitations and international law. Some of the threatened changes would have undermined the independence of the judiciary (for instance, the minister of justice’s proposed power to second judges to courts against their will), but we were also concerned by threats to the independence of the legal profession. The government had proposed that the minister of justice should have supervisory power over a range of the bar’s activities, such as association resolutions or disciplinary proceedings, as well as the introduction of a new category of lawyers overseen by the ministry. Finally, there was the threat of the introduction of a maximum fee cap, which lawyers feared would be set at an unreasonably low level.

These are the issues which Joanna Agacka-Indecka had to deal with. Those who met her were always impressed by the grace and resoluteness with which she defended the core principles of the legal profession. It is a shock to realise that she is no longer with us.

From the window of my office, I overlook a park, and see yet more budding spring trees. As we know, some things in life are transient, and some – like the values that Joanna Agacka-Indecka defended so valiantly – are permanent.

Jonathan Goldsmith is the secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe, which represents more than 700,000 European lawyers through its member bars and law societies