Police Deployed as Poland Moves Against Top Court Justices

Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek said he had requested that tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice-President Bartłomiej Sochański be stripped of immunity from prosecution. That is the operative legal step described by the BBC: a request aimed at allowing charges, not charges themselves.

Outside the court, politicians from the opposition Law and Justice party, PiS, gathered to protest, and riot police were deployed to stop demonstrators from entering the building. The tribunal answered in the language of institutional panic. In a social media post, it said the two men remained the legally appointed senior justices and that those involved in the move were committing “the crime of a coup d’etat.”

That is an accusation from one side of the struggle, not a neutral legal finding. But it captures the scale of the dispute. This is not a routine personnel matter dressed up as drama. It is a fight over who can claim lawful control of a court that has sat at the center of Poland’s constitutional conflict for years.

Żurek’s case, according to the BBC, is that Święczkowski and Sochański should face criminal charges for not allowing judges elected by parliament to adjudicate. One of those judges, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, has now been placed in temporary charge of the court.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said his government was acting to restore the rule of law. “Restoring the rule of law is our duty,” he wrote on social media. “After years of Law and Justice's lawlessness, this is a difficult, sometimes painful process that requires decisive action. There is no other way.”

The difficulty for Tusk is that Poland’s tribunal is already a damaged institution, and damage does not make the next move self-justifying. The court became the spark for the broader rule-of-law dispute after PiS took office in 2015 and moved quickly to shape its membership. The BBC reports that the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union later ruled that three judges had been elected improperly because their appointments duplicated positions already validly filled by the previous parliament. Those rulings underlie Tusk’s decision to stop publishing the tribunal’s judgments.

Yet even opposition to the PiS-era overhaul does not settle the legality of this latest move. The BBC cites lawyer Marcin Matczak, a critic of those judicial reforms and of Święczkowski personally, saying the suspension had no legal basis “for a million reasons.” He warned that images of armed police and a theory under which the justice minister can remove the tribunal’s president by decree would produce an anti-rule-of-law backlash for years.

President Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by PiS, turned his plane back to Warsaw while en route to Senegal. He has already been in conflict with Tusk’s government over the court and has refused to swear in five judges elected by parliament since March, citing alleged flaws in their selection procedure. Earlier this month, the Venice Commission said he should swear them in so they could sit on the bench.

That is where this episode becomes bleakly Polish in the specific, not the generic sense: nearly every actor says he is defending legality, and nearly every procedural safeguard now looks, to the other side, like an instrument of capture.