The latest crisis began on Friday evening when a group of judges chosen by the current parliament announced that one of their number, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, was now in charge of the Tribunal.
They said she had suspended its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański.
As protests grew outside the court, Nawrocki cut short a trip to Senegal and visited the premises, declaring on Saturday that the constitutional order had been violated and a constitutional body seized by force.
Blame on PiS and the president
Viktoria Grossmann, Warsaw correspondent of Süddeutsche Zeitung, wrote on Wednesday that the events “give an impression of chaos” and warned the constitutional crisis could turn into a crisis of trust.
She said the “clearly guilty” parties were the former PiS government, which she said had degraded the tribunal into its own executive organ from 2015, and Nawrocki.
Tusk’s government, she wrote, had avoided confrontation, waited for judges’ terms to expire and chosen successors by constitutional procedure. Nawrocki and the tribunal’s president refused to let them work, so the new judges entered the building in the president’s absence while police stood by defensively.
Grossmann said Tusk had lost some trust among pro-European voters over what she called “deliberate disregard” of the right to asylum on the Belarus border and an unfulfilled promise to legalise abortion. But she said the government’s calm approach had won it trust.
“If it does not fall into populism and proposes a way to resolve the dispute, it will emerge from this crisis strengthened”, she wrote.
‘Doubtful’ status
Frauke Rostalski, a criminal law professor at the University of Cologne, reached a different verdict in Die Welt on Tuesday, asking “Who broke the constitution?”
She said last Friday’s suspension of the tribunal’s leadership stood on “shaky” ground. Korwin-Piotrowska’s status was “doubtful” because she had not taken an oath before the president, and suspending a tribunal president fell to the justice minister or the president himself, not a judge, Rostalski argued.
“Korwin-Piotrowska appointed herself, which from a legal point of view is hardly tenable”, she wrote. “Much suggests that at least the action carried out last Friday by a judge who authorised herself constitutes a breach of the constitution”.
The use of police, she added, showed the Tusk government had backed the move politically. She said the tribunal suffers from a lack of recognition and that only a “new beginning” could offer a way out.
Experts have warned of disinformation around the dispute. NASK’s Disinformation Analysis Centre said further false narratives were highly likely to appear soon.
(jh)
Source: PAP, Polish Radio