Rafał Leśkiewicz said on Wednesday that passing a state budget without funds for the tribunal would be unlawful and an attack on Poland’s constitutional order.
“The Constitutional Tribunal must have its budget to function,” Leśkiewicz told public broadcaster Polish Radio. “This attempt to starve the Constitutional Tribunal is an attack on sovereignty and an attack on the Polish Constitution.”
The Constitutional Tribunal reviews whether Polish laws comply with the constitution. Its head, Bogdan Święczkowski, asked the leadership of the Sejm, Poland’s lower house of parliament, in September to ensure that funding for the court was included in the 2027 state budget.
The government’s draft budget, adopted in late September, does not include the tribunal’s proposed revenue and expenditure plan.
The Ministry of Finance said the plan submitted to it had not been approved by the General Assembly of Constitutional Tribunal Judges, as required by law. Lower-house Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty said in early October that he would not proceed with Święczkowski’s request to include the plan in the budget for the same reason.
Leśkiewicz rejected that argument. “The fact that the expenditure plan for the Constitutional Tribunal has not been adopted by the General Assembly of Judges does not change the fact that funds cannot simply be denied to the Constitutional Tribunal,” he said.
Święczkowski has said he twice convened the General Assembly, on June 24 and July 14, in an effort to approve the budget. Neither meeting produced the necessary resolution.
He blamed two judges, Dariusz Szostek and Magdalena Bentkowska, for leaving one meeting and depriving it of a quorum.
Szostek said at the time that they walked out because all properly elected judges had to be allowed to participate for the assembly to act lawfully.
That dispute is tied to a wider conflict over the composition of the tribunal. Four of six judges elected by the Sejm in March have not been admitted to hear cases after they were not invited by the president to take the judicial oath.
They later took an oath during a ceremony in the Sejm using a formula declaring it to be made “before the president,” but Święczkowski has not recognized the procedure.
There is also no presidential decision yet on Maciej Berek, who was recently elected by the Sejm to the tribunal.
Leśkiewicz said on Wednesday that the president had concerns over whether Berek had provided documentation proving that he met the statutory requirement of having practiced as a legal adviser for at least 10 years.
The Sejm is due to hold the first reading of the 2027 state budget on Thursday.
Under the constitution, the budget must be submitted to the president within four months of its introduction in the Sejm. If that deadline is missed, the president may shorten the Sejm’s term and trigger an early parliamentary election.
The Constitutional Tribunal’s budget for 2026 was about PLN 67.4 million.
(rt)
Source: IAR/PAP