Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal Chief Suspended as Police Surround Court and Nawrocki Rushes Home
Poland plunged into a full-blown constitutional standoff Friday after a judge elected by Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s parliamentary majority ordered the Constitutional Tribunal’s president and vice president off the job while police deployed outside the court.
A notice posted on the tribunal’s website announced an immediate break in official duties for Tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice President Bartłomiej Sochański, Euronews reported. The order came from Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, who claims to be acting head of the court.
The tribunal’s own X account fired back, calling the move an “unlawful takeover of the website” and insisting Święczkowski remains president.
The account also declared that Korwin-Piotrowska is not a tribunal judge at all and accused those involved of committing the crime of a coup d’état.
Korwin-Piotrowska told TVP Info she personally issued both orders, according to Rzeczpospolita. She cited a 2016 law that lets the longest-serving judge stand in for the president. The suspensions run for one month pending disciplinary review.
Judges aligned with her said the pair blocked a general assembly needed to pass the court’s 2027 budget, stacked case panels arbitrarily and, since April 9, barred judges chosen by parliament from hearing cases.
At the same time, Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek, who also serves as Tusk’s justice minister, said he delivered five requests to strip immunity, four targeting Święczkowski and one targeting Sochański. The filings run 224 pages with 50 volumes of case files, OKO.press reported.
Conflicting Accounts of the Police Role
Accounts of the police operation conflicted sharply. Law and Justice leader Jarosław Kaczyński wrote that “Tusk’s services are forcibly entering the Tribunal” and later declared that Poland had become a police state.
Sochański said he was barred from entering the building. “I had very serious doubts about whether President Święczkowski’s assessment of a coup d’état was correct, but today I no longer have those doubts,” he said, per PolandDaily24.
Warsaw police flatly denied going inside. They said a tribunal judge requested security for the surrounding area and that officers worked only outside, on the public street, Aleja Szucha.
Police added that three people were detained after climbing the fence onto tribunal grounds and that dangerous objects were thrown at officers near a protest outside the court.
Święczkowski arrived after 8 p.m. and branded his rivals usurpers, saying “all decisions made by these usurpers are unlawful from beginning to end.”
President Karol Nawrocki broke off a flight to Senegal. “At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am interrupting the flight to Senegal. I am coming back,” he wrote. His plane later landed in Warsaw.
Supreme Court First President Zbigniew Kapiński condemned sending police to the tribunal and barring the vice president from the building, calling the events unprecedented in a democratic state. Nawrocki’s office said the president would meet him promptly.
Tusk defended the operation on X. “Restoring the rule of law is our duty. After years of PiS lawlessness, it is a difficult, sometimes painful process and requires decisive action. There is no other way,” he wrote.
Criticism was not limited to Law and Justice. Konfederacja’s Sławomir Mentzen called it “probably simply a coup d’état,” and constitutional scholar Marcin Matczak, a harsh Święczkowski critic, said there was no legal basis to suspend him.
The clash grows out of a long fight over who sits on the court. Tusk’s government has refused to recognize a tribunal stacked by Law and Justice, Notes from Poland reported.
Nawrocki, elected with Law and Justice support, refused to swear in four of six judges parliament chose in March, citing doubts about their election.
Those judges took their oaths in parliament instead and won a European Court of Human Rights order to be seated, but Święczkowski refused to comply. Quotes were translated from Polish, and the situation remained fluid late Friday.
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