Waldemar Żurek said he had instructed prosecutors to open proceedings against officials in the President's Office and possibly others who advised Nawrocki not to accept the oaths of four judges elected by parliament in March.
The National Public Prosecutor’s Office said on Monday that the case concerns suspected assistance in a failure to perform official duties and abuse of power.
It said the alleged actions took place in Warsaw between March 13 and April 9 and may have harmed both the judges involved and the public interest in the proper functioning of the judiciary.
At the center of the dispute is the Constitutional Tribunal, Poland’s court for reviewing whether laws comply with the constitution.
Parliament elected six judges to the tribunal in March. Nawrocki accepted the oaths of two of them, Dariusz Szostek and Magdalena Bentkowska, but did not do so for Krystian Markiewicz, Maciej Taborowski, Marcin Dziurda and Anna Korwin-Piotrowska.
Last Thursday, all six judges took oaths in the Sejm, the lower house of parliament. They then submitted written versions of those oaths to the President's Office and went to the tribunal’s headquarters.
Six newly elected Constitutional Tribunal judges took their oaths in Poland’s parliament last Thursday in the absence of the president, intensifying a political and legal standoff over the top court. Photo: PAP/Paweł Supernak
Zbigniew Bogucki, head of Nawrocki's office, said the president did not recognize what happened in parliament as a valid judicial oath.
Constitutional Tribunal head Bogdan Święczkowski said that only the two judges sworn in by the president had taken office. He said he could not assign cases or offices to the other four because he had not been informed by the president that they had taken their oaths before him.
Żurek called Nawrocki’s decision unlawful and unconstitutional.
"The fact that the president picked and chose from the six is a breach of the law," he said.
He argued that a Constitutional Tribunal judge gains that status through election by the lower house, not through a later political decision by the president or the tribunal’s leadership.
The National Public Prosecutor’s Office said reports that presidential advisers had reviewed the judges’ biographies and then arbitrarily selected only some of them for swearing-in raised serious legal concerns.
It added that any steps aimed at delaying or preventing the oath should be treated as legally inadmissible.
The probe announced by Żurek is the latest chapter in Poland’s long-running dispute over the constitutional court, which has been at the centre of rule-of-law battles for years.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled in December that Poland's Constitutional Tribunal had breached key principles of EU law by failing to respect the EU court's judgments, and said the tribunal did not meet EU standards of independence because of irregularities in the appointment of three of its members and former tribunal president Julia Przyłębska.
After the ruling, Prime Minister Donald Tusk said it amounted to a "green light" to "fix the tribunal" after years of legal turmoil.
In January, Żurek called for cross-party talks on "rebuilding a tribunal that is lawful, independent and trusted."
Under Poland’s constitution, Constitutional Tribunal judges are elected by parliament for nine-year terms.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP