Lawmakers from Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing coalition on Wednesday submitted a draft resolution saying action is needed to rebuild the Constitutional Tribunal so it meets the standards of a court established by law - independent, and impartial.
The measure was published on the parliament's website before noon and later taken up by the lower house’s Justice and Human Rights Committee.
The draft says the tribunal has ceased to function as an impartial and independent guardian of constitutional rights under both Polish constitutional standards and binding European and international standards.
It says that assessment has been reflected in rulings by Poland’s Supreme Court, the Supreme Administrative Court, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Court of Justice of the European Union.
The proposed resolution states that the tribunal, while it included Mariusz Muszyński, Henryk Cioch, and Lech Morawski, did not meet the standards of a lawful, independent, and impartial court because the three were elected in what the draft describes as a flagrant breach of the basic rules for appointing judges.
It also argues that the 2016 appointment of former tribunal president Julia Przyłębska was legally defective because it was made without a prior resolution from the General Assembly of Constitutional Tribunal Judges.
As a result, the draft says, the tribunal was led by an unauthorized person and failed to meet the standards required of a lawful court.
It makes the same argument about the appointment of the tribunal’s current president, Bogdan Święczkowski.
The resolution further says that three judges elected in 2015, Roman Hauser, Andrzej Jakubecki, and Krzysztof Ślebzak, were lawfully chosen but were illegally prevented from taking office when President Andrzej Duda refused to accept their oaths of office.
The text says MPs see it as necessary to shape the tribunal’s membership so it can once again operate in line with the Polish Constitution and regain public trust. That includes electing judges to vacant seats.
Friday’s vote is expected to be a major step in that effort.
According to lower-house Speaker Włodzimierz Czarzasty, the chamber will vote on six names put forward by the Presidium of the Sejm, the body that helps organize the house’s work.
They are Krystian Markiewicz, Maciej Taborowski, Marcin Dziurda, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, Dariusz Szostek and Magdalena Bentkowska.
The opposition Law and Justice party (PiS) has also nominated two candidates, Artur Kotowski and Michał Skwarzyński.
The tribunal has 15 seats, and six have been vacant since the second half of December. Two more terms are due to expire later this year.
The house has already failed four times to elect candidates previously put forward only by PiS.
The tribunal dispute has been one of the central rule-of-law battles in Poland for nearly a decade.
It dates back to October 2015, when the outgoing parliament elected five judges. After PiS won power, the new Sejm declared that election invalid and chose five different judges in December that year.
In a key ruling on December 3, 2015, the Constitutional Tribunal said that three of the judges chosen by the previous parliament had been elected properly, while two had been elected improperly because their predecessors’ terms ended only after the new parliament had taken office.
The tribunal also said the president was obliged to accept the oaths of newly elected judges without delay.
That decision became the basis of the long-running conflict over three tribunal seats, occupied by figures whom the then opposition, now the governing coalition, and some legal experts have described as “stand-in judges” or “duplicate judges,” meaning people elected to seats that had already been filled lawfully.
The current draft builds on a March 2024 Sejm resolution on the constitutional crisis of 2015 to 2023.
In that earlier measure, lawmakers argued that treating tribunal rulings issued in breach of the law as valid could itself violate the principle that public authorities must act on a legal basis.
Since then, the government has not published tribunal rulings in the Journal of Laws, the official gazette in which legal acts are formally promulgated.
A government resolution adopted in December 2024 said publishing decisions issued by what it described as an unauthorized body could deepen Poland’s rule-of-law crisis.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP