A Takeover at Poland’s Top Court

On the evening of Friday, Oct 30, police surrounded Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw after the court’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy were declared suspended.

The order came from Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, a judge whose oath President Karol Nawrocki never accepted, so under the law she has not taken up office, but still she declared herself the head of the court, and armed police then kept the lawful president out of his own building.

The Tribunal’s leadership calls this an illegal takeover and a coup, and the president cut short his trip to Senegal to return to Warsaw. Poland’s constitution says judges of the Tribunal answer only to the constitution.

The legal basis offered for the move is thin: Korwin-Piotrowska relied on a rule for presidents of ordinary courts, which gives that power to the justice minister, and on a provision that lets the longest-serving judge stand in for an absent president. However, Święczkowski was neither absent nor vacant. Marcin Matczak, a constitutional lawyer who has criticised Święczkowski and the old PiS-era reforms and calls him the worst person to lead the court, says the legal basis does not exist, and that a minister suspending the Tribunal’s president would breach five provisions of the constitution.

The government on the other hand side says the Tribunal is illegitimate and ignores its rulings, but a court cannot be repaired by breaking the rules that protect it. Nawrocki, for his part, says he must check that new judges meet the legal requirements, and that the law requires their oath to be taken before the president.

The people outside the court are largely supporters of the opposition Law and Justice party, many with rosaries, chanting “Tusk traitor” and accusing the government of trampling constitutional rights. Their leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski called it a coup against the Tribunal. For the protesters, the issue is simple: a government that wants to enforce the rule of law cannot do so with a judge’s self-declared order and a police cordon. The Tribunal’s defenders say the next step should be a legal process with the president, not force.

Tom Rose, the US Ambassador to Poland said in a statement, that "the events unfolding tonight at Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal are very serious indeed. We appear to be witnessing an unprecedented confrontation over the government’s use of state power and the independence and authority of a constitutional institution."