One building, two tribunals: what is happening at Poland's Constitutional Tribunal

In the afternoon, a notice appeared on the Tribunal's website: the Tribunal's president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, had been ordered to suspend their duties.

The order was issued by Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska. The Sejm elected her this year. President Nawrocki did not accept her oath, and she took it without him. Święczkowski did not allow her to take up her duties.

As the legal basis, Korwin-Piotrowska cited Article 130 of the Law on the System of Common Courts. It allows a court president or the justice minister to immediately suspend a judge for up to one month if the judge has been detained after being caught committing an intentional offence, or if the authority of the court or essential interests of the service require immediate removal; if the judge is a court president, only the minister may do so. She also spoke of a “state of constitutional necessity”. The stated grounds were that, since 9 April, Święczkowski had prevented the newly elected judges from adjudicating, assigned cases arbitrarily and blocked the convening of the judges' general assembly. She called the assembly for 3 November.

According to the Tribunal's spokeswoman, Weronika Ścibor, seven judges elected this year entered the building escorted by the State Protection Service (SOP, which reports to the interior minister) — through a gate on the side of the prime minister's chancellery rather than from the street, where protesters had gathered.

After Korwin-Piotrowska reported a threat to the judges' life and health, police entered the Tribunal's grounds. The police said they did not enter the building.

The Tribunal's official X account, still controlled by Święczkowski's side, announced an “unlawful takeover” of the Tribunal's website, stated that Korwin-Piotrowska was not a judge of the Tribunal and wrote that everyone involved was committing the crime of a coup d'état.

Outside, Święczkowski's supporters cut the gate chain with a power tool. Three people were detained while climbing the fence. Święczkowski left the grounds, saying he would not fight the police and would return with the president.

Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek filed five requests to lift immunity — four concerning Święczkowski and one concerning Sochański — together with 50 volumes of case files. They were received by Korwin-Piotrowska as the longest-serving judge.

Law and Justice (PiS) leader Jarosław Kaczyński wrote on X that “from today, Poland is becoming a police state”, and in the evening, outside the Tribunal, called on the president to do everything within his powers “so that this is stopped”.

President Nawrocki was flying to Senegal on a state visit. Over southern Spain, he ordered the plane to turn back: “At a moment like this, the president must be in Poland.”

At around 1 a.m., Nawrocki entered the Tribunal building together with the First President of the Supreme Court, Zbigniew Kapiński. A scuffle followed. Video has been published, but accounts of what happened differ:

• Judge Maciej Berek wrote that the president had “chosen the path of physical confrontation with Tribunal judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska”;
• the president's representatives said the judges had violated the president's inviolability.

No injuries have been reported.

According to media reports, the president told the judges that they were not judges of the Tribunal and were taking over the building illegally.

At around 5 a.m., Nawrocki left the building. His statement, read out by the head of the President's Cabinet, Paweł Szefernaker, said that during the night there had been “a violation of the constitutional order of the Republic of Poland and a forcible takeover of a constitutional organ of the state”. The president demanded that the forces sent by the government leave the Tribunal's grounds and, citing a threat to Poland's internal security, called urgent consultations with the parliamentary parties.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk wrote on X that, after years of PiS lawlessness, restoring the rule of law is a difficult and sometimes painful process that requires decisive action: “There is no other way.”

Two ambassadors resigned: Paweł Soloch in Romania said that after the attempt to take over the Tribunal unlawfully he saw no possibility of continuing in office, while Jakub Kumoch in China stepped down citing the events in the country. The First President of the Supreme Court, Kapiński, had already written in a statement on the evening of 30 October that the police must not be an instrument for carrying out the political will of those in power.

2015. The outgoing Civic Platform (PO) majority in the Sejm elected five judges to the Tribunal — three for vacancies arising in November and two for vacancies that would arise only in December, after the new Sejm had convened. The new PiS government and President Andrzej Duda did not accept these judges and elected five of their own. In December the Tribunal ruled that three of the PO-elected judges had been chosen lawfully and two had not. Duda nevertheless did not swear in any of the three.

This detail is often left out: at the start of the dispute, both sides acted questionably. PO tried to elect judges to seats that were not yet vacant; PiS responded by appointing its own even where the earlier election had been lawful.

2016–2023. The PiS government refused to publish Tribunal rulings it disliked, and the European Commission launched rule-of-law proceedings. In 2021 the European Court of Human Rights ruled in Xero Flor v. Poland that a Tribunal panel including an unlawfully appointed judge was not a “tribunal established by law”. The same year, the Tribunal declared parts of the EU Treaty incompatible with the Polish constitution.

2024. After the 2023 election, Tusk's coalition came to power. On 6 March the Sejm adopted a resolution declaring the appointment of several judges and of the Tribunal's leadership unlawful. The government stopped publishing and implementing the Tribunal's rulings and refused to fill vacancies as judges' nine-year terms expired. In December, Bogdan Święczkowski — a senior prosecution official under the PiS government — became the Tribunal's president.

18 December 2025. In case C-448/23 Commission v Poland, the EU Court of Justice upheld the Commission's action in full. It found that the Polish Constitutional Tribunal does not meet the requirements of an independent and impartial tribunal previously established by law, and that its 2021 rulings breached the principle of the primacy of EU law. Tusk's government did not contest the infringement.

In March, the coalition began filling the vacancies. By October, the Sejm had elected eight judges — in theory giving the Sejm's choices a majority on the 15-member Tribunal.

Polish law requires a Tribunal judge to take the oath “before the president”. President Nawrocki, elected in 2025 with PiS support, swore in three of them but did not accept the oath of five, questioning the election procedure and the candidates' qualifications. The five took the oath without the president and submitted it to the presidential chancellery. Święczkowski did not allow them to take up their duties.

What followed:

• May. The European Court of Human Rights issued an interim order to admit four of the judges. Święczkowski responded that the ECHR lacked jurisdiction. The Tribunal later ruled that the president is not obliged to accept the oath of judges elected by the Sejm.
• September. Prosecutors charged the head of the Tribunal's chancellery and its head of security over preventing the new judges from taking up their posts. Both pleaded not guilty; the Tribunal called the charges intimidation. Święczkowski, in turn, opened disciplinary proceedings against three judges whom the president had sworn in, but who were boycotting the general assembly in solidarity with their excluded colleagues.
• October. Maciej Berek, a former official in Tusk's government, also took the oath without the president. The presidential chancellery questions whether he has the professional experience required by law; Berek says he has submitted proof.
• For several weeks before 30 October, PiS supporters maintained a camp outside the Tribunal to keep the new judges from entering.

There is no consensus among lawyers even in the government-friendly camp. Law professor and constitutional scholar Marcin Matczak, a long-standing critic of the PiS reforms, wrote on X that the legal basis for suspending the Tribunal's president was “non-existent for a million reasons”: the justice minister oversees the common courts, not the Tribunal. Former Tribunal president Jerzy Stępień, by contrast, told Rzeczpospolita that “theoretically” he saw a formal legal basis for such an order, but did not want to prejudge it, as the situation required in-depth analysis.

This is exactly why the crisis cannot be resolved in the usual way. Each side can point to a real violation by the other. And the only body that could settle the dispute is the very body being disputed. Żurek's immunity requests will be decided by the Tribunal — but which one?

Latvia's Constitutional Court Law provides for a similar procedure:

• judges are confirmed by the Saeima (Section 4(1));
• the oath is “accepted by the President” (Section 5(1));
• “a Constitutional Court judge begins to perform his or her duties after taking the oath (solemn promise)” (Section 5(2)).

The exception is judges who have already sworn an oath as judges of another court — they do not retake it and start work immediately after confirmation (Section 5(3)). The Court's president and vice-president are elected by the judges themselves from among their number for three years (Section 12).

This does not mean Latvia faces a Polish scenario. But formally, our system has the same point where Poland reached deadlock: the moment between the parliament's decision and the president's acceptance of the oath. So far it has not been a problem in Latvia, because no president has used the oath as a veto.

Poland's experience shows that institutions are protected not only by the letter of the law, but by politicians' willingness to respect limits that never needed to be written into it. When that willingness disappears, the law turns out to protect less than we thought.

• 3 November. The Tribunal judges' general assembly convened by Korwin-Piotrowska. According to her, the agenda is the Tribunal's 2027 budget and the five immunity requests; Święczkowski will be able to give an explanation.
• 3 November, 15:00. The president has called a closed session of the National Security Council. According to media reports, the agenda is a permanent US military base in Poland, not the Tribunal. Sławomir Mentzen (Confederation) had called for the council to be convened over the Tribunal.
• The president's urgent consultations with the parliamentary parties — announced on the morning of 31 October “for today”, with no time given; whether they took place, and with what result, was not publicly known at the time of publication.
• The requests to lift Święczkowski's and Sochański's immunity.

• What the president's consultations with the parliamentary parties have produced and who took part.
• Whether and how the European Commission has responded. We found no official Commission statement before publication.
• Whether the 3 November assembly will take place and which judges each side will consider its members.
• What exactly happened during the scuffle in the Tribunal building — the two sides' accounts differ, and the published video shows only part of it.
• The exact numbers: September reports mention six judges elected in March and four refused the oath; October reports mention eight elected this year and five refused (including Berek). This article uses the most recent figures.