A row over Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal that has simmered since 2015 boiled over in Warsaw on Friday night. Judges picked by today’s majority in parliament sidelined Bogdan Święczkowski, who heads the tribunal, along with second-in-command Bartłomiej Sochański, for thirty days. One of them, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, announced she was taking over, citing her seniority on the bench.
Święczkowski, a former deputy justice minister in the Law and Justice (PiS) government, refused to step aside and called it a coup. Sochański never got past the entrance. Outside, hundreds of PiS supporters, with the party’s chairman Jarosław Kaczyński in the crowd, rallied behind the ousted pair. Helmeted officers formed a cordon; according to police, missiles flew at them and a trio of protesters ended up in custody after climbing in.
Head of state Karol Nawrocki, who sides with PiS, got the news aboard a jet bound for Dakar. He ordered the jet back, posting “At a moment like this, the president must be in Poland”. Shortly before 1am he pushed through the police line into the court, and a statement read out at dawn accused the government of seizing a constitutional body “by force”.
At the root sits a dispute about five newly chosen judges. Nawrocki would not swear them in, and Święczkowski would not let them hear cases, even though Europe’s constitutional advisers on the Venice Commission had urged that a missing oath was no reason to bar them. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek now wants both senior judges stripped of immunity and charged. Prime Minister Donald Tusk called the step a duty to repair the legal order, however “painful”.
Not everyone on Tusk’s side is cheering. Law professor Marcin Matczak, a long-time critic of the PiS reforms, said the suspension has no legal footing and warned that pictures of armed police at a court could set the cause back for decades. With an election due next year, the clash looks set to deepen Poland’s divide.
