Its latest chapter began on Friday with an order suspending the official duties of Constitutional Tribunal chief Bogdan Święczkowski and his deputy Bartłomiej Sochański.
Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, citing her status as the judge with the longest judicial service, said she was now overseeing the court's work.
Korwin-Piotrowska has called a meeting of the court's general assembly for Tuesday to discuss its proposed 2027 budget.
The latest escalation came after Korwin-Piotrowska on Friday announced an order on the Tribunal’s website suspending Święczkowski and Sochański from their official duties for a month.
Justice Minister and Prosecutor-General Waldemar Żurek said at the same time that prosecutors had submitted requests to lift their judicial immunities.
Święczkowski and Sochański were also barred from entering the court. Święczkowski said the measures were unlawful.
"Until yesterday, the Tribunal was effectively not carrying out its duties," Korwin-Piotrowska said on Saturday. "Delays in handling cases stretch back as much as 12 years. Around 1,000 cases are pending before the Tribunal, many of them delayed for at least several years. At the same time, cases initiated by politicians are dealt with almost immediately."
The standoff that has been unfolding since Friday is part of a more than decade-long dispute over Poland’s constitutional court.
On the night from Friday to Saturday, President Karol Nawrocki arrived at the Tribunal’s headquarters after protesters and a large police presence had gathered outside the building on Szucha Avenue in central Warsaw.
On Saturday, Prime Minister Donald Tusk addressed the nation, saying that "a democratic state must be strong and capable of upholding justice."
How the crisis evolved
The Constitutional Tribunal was established by a law of March 26, 1982, and began issuing rulings in 1986, when Poland was still under communism.
Its functioning underwent significant changes under the 1997 constitution adopted eight years after the fall of communism.
Until the autumn of 1999, the court's rulings were not final and could be rejected by the lower house of parliament, the Sejm, with a two-thirds majority.
The most serious crisis in the institution’s history began in 2015 when the right-wing Law and Justice (PiS) party came into power.
Over more than a decade, the multifaceted conflict surrounding the Tribunal has had a wide-ranging legal, political and administrative impact, drawing response from international institutions.
Ultimately, it led many lawyers and politicians to question the validity of rulings issued by the Tribunal.
The crisis can be traced to October 8, 2015, when the lower house—primarily with the support of the then-ruling Civic Platform (PO) and Polish People's Party (PSL) coalition—elected five new Constitutional Tribunal judges: Roman Hauser, Krzysztof Ślebzak, Andrzej Jakubecki, Bronisław Sitek and Andrzej Sokala.
They were to replace three judges whose terms were ending on November 6 of that year and two whose terms were ending in December 2015, during the next parliamentary term.
In November 2015, the newly elected Sejm, already dominated by the PiS party, adopted resolutions declaring that the October 8 election of the Tribunal judges had no legal effect.
It then elected Julia Przyłębska, Piotr Pszczółkowski, Henryk Cioch, Lech Morawski and Mariusz Muszyński as Tribunal judges on PiS nominations.
The last three were elected to replace judges whose terms had ended in November.
Then-President Andrzej Duda immediately swore them into office.
In December 2015, the Constitutional Tribunal, then headed by Andrzej Rzepliński, ruled that the previous parliament had unconstitutionally elected two judges to replace judges whose terms ended in December, while the election of the other three, replacing judges whose terms ended in November, was constitutional.
The Tribunal also ruled that the president was required to receive the oath of each newly elected judge "without delay."
"The Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling therefore in no way repeals or invalidates the resolutions adopted by the Sejm. Those resolutions remain in force, and today the president is implementing them," Duda said at the time.
He said that he was making the point "unambiguously" because he had heard calls for the three judges elected by the previous parliament to be sworn in.
That parliament, he argued, had "completely lost its social legitimacy, or, more precisely, its majority had."
This opened the main front in the dispute over the three Tribunal seats.
The judges who occupied those seats were described by the then-opposition, now-ruling parties, as well as some lawyers, as "double judges" who had taken positions that had already been lawfully filled.
The term was also used in reference to Mariusz Muszyński, who retired after his judicial term ended in 2024, as well as Justyn Piskorski and Jarosław Wyrembak, who were elected to replace Cioch and Morawski after their deaths. The issue has affected assessments of the validity of Tribunal rulings issued by panels that included those judges.
The dispute also acquired an international dimension.
In May 2021, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that Poland had violated the European Convention on Human Rights in the case of Xero Flor, including the right to a fair hearing and the right to a tribunal established by law.
The company had sued Poland. After losing in the domestic courts, it took the case to the Constitutional Tribunal, which discontinued the proceedings in a decision signed by Muszyński.
The company challenged the composition of the Tribunal panel that had considered its case before the European court.
The Strasbourg court found that a judge who was not lawfully entitled to sit had participated in the case. It ordered Poland to pay the company more than EUR 3,000 in compensation.
Several months later, following a request from then-Prosecutor-General Zbigniew Ziobro, the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that a provision of the European Convention on Human Rights granting the ECHR authority to assess the legality of the election of Constitutional Tribunal judges was incompatible with the Polish constitution.
The Tribunal said the status of the Constitutional Tribunal and its judges was "determined exclusively by the constitution."
In response to criticism challenging the status of the three judges, Przyłębska, who succeeded Rzepliński as Tribunal head, repeatedly said that "there are no judges in the Constitutional Tribunal who were elected unlawfully; all judges were elected in accordance with the law."
"I assume that these political statements ... and the use of terms such as 'neo-judges' and 'double judges' are for political purposes, and that in reality these people have enough knowledge to assess that the Constitutional Tribunal operates in accordance with the law and that the judges sitting on it were elected in accordance with the law," she said.
Dispute over top judge
The legal basis for Przyłębska’s appointment as Tribunal head itself became another element of the dispute, which eventually led to a temporary split among the judges.
The current ruling coalition has argued that the general assembly of Constitutional Tribunal Judges did not adopt a resolution in 2016 presenting candidates for the positions of president and vice president of the Tribunal.
Lawmakers from the ruling coalition said that Przyłębska was appointed by Duda as head of the Constitutional Tribunal "without the required resolution."
Some lawyers, including former and current Constitutional Tribunal judges, also argued that Przyłębska’s term expired after six years, on December 20, 2022, and that she was not eligible to seek another term.
Przyłębska herself, as well as the previous government and some experts, argued that her term as Tribunal head did not expire until December 2024, when her term as a Constitutional Tribunal judge also ended.
Some of the problems surrounding the position of Tribunal head stemmed from legislative confusion over the rules governing the court, including successive laws, amendments and disputes over their interpretation.
Three separate laws currently govern the functioning of the Constitutional Tribunal: the law on the status of Constitutional Tribunal judges, the law on the organisation and proceedings of the Tribunal, and provisions introducing the law on the organisation and proceedings before the Tribunal.
A law on the organisation and proceedings before the Tribunal adopted in late November 2016 introduced a six-year term for the Tribunal head. Previously, no fixed term had been set, and the president served until the end of their term as a Tribunal judge.
The previous regulation expired on December 20, 2016. This was significant because Przyłębska was appointed Tribunal head on December 21, 2016. However, the provision establishing a fixed presidential term did not enter into force until January 3, 2017, after Przyłębska had been appointed. This led to a debate over whether the six-year term applied to her.
The issue was settled when Przyłębska’s term as a judge expired and she left the Tribunal.
In December 2024, during the final days of her term, Duda appointed Bogdan Święczkowski as the new head of the Constitutional Tribunal for a six-year term. His term as a Tribunal judge is formally due to end in February 2031.
During the previous right-wing government, Święczkowski served as a deputy justice minister under Ziobro, and from 2016 to 2022 headed the National Public Prosecutor’s Office.
He had previously worked for many years as a prosecutor, including on organised crime cases, and headed the Internal Security Agency (ABW) from 2006 to 2007.
Soon after taking office as Tribunal head, Święczkowski invited the prime minister, the Speakers of both houses of parliament, political party leaders, the ombudsman and the heads of the Supreme Court, National Council of the Judiciary and the National Bank of Poland to discuss the future of the Constitutional Tribunal.
"The Constitutional Tribunal and its activities should remain outside political disputes," he said in a letter to state officials.
The invitation was not taken up by the government or the parliamentary majority.
Dispute under Tusk government
The Constitutional Tribunal has been criticised by the current authorities and some lawyers, who, citing rulings by the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union, describe it as politicised.
In March 2024, parliament adopted a resolution on removing the effects of the 2015-2023 constitutional crisis.
It stated that “taking into account, in the activities of a public authority, rulings of the Constitutional Tribunal issued in violation of the law may be considered a violation of the principle of legality by those authorities.”
The resolution also stated that sitting Tribunal judges Jarosław Wyrembak and Justyn Piskorski were not Constitutional Tribunal judges."
Since lawmakers adopted the resolution, Constitutional Tribunal rulings have not been published in the Dziennik Ustaw journal of laws.
Earlier, some published Tribunal rulings had carried annotations stating that they had been issued by panels whose composition violated rules governing the election of Tribunal judges and the essence of the right to a court.
In May 2024, the Constitutional Tribunal ruled that the parliamentary resolution on removing the effects of the constitutional crisis concerning the Tribunal was unconstitutional.
The government also adopted a resolution concerning the Tribunal in December 2024, arguing that publishing its rulings would perpetuate Poland’s rule-of-law crisis.
The government said violations of the Constitution and the law by the Tribunal "had reached a scale that prevents this body from performing its constitutional duties in reviewing the constitutionality of laws, including protecting human and civil rights."
As a result, citing the constitutional principle of legality, the government said that "it is not permissible to publish documents issued by an unauthorised body."
The lower house also passed two laws in 2024 aimed at reforming the Constitutional Tribunal, restoring its independence and rebuilding public trust.
One was a new Constitutional Tribunal law and the other introduced provisions to implement the changes.
Together with a proposed constitutional amendment, the measures were presented by then-Justice Minister Adam Bodnar and members of the ruling coalition as a comprehensive reform package for the Tribunal.
The proposed Tribunal law provided for judges to be elected by the Sejm with a three-fifths majority, or 276 lawmakers, with at least half of the statutory number of lawmakers present.
Candidates could be nominated, as before, by lawmakers and the Sejm Presidium, as well as by the president, the National Council of Prosecutors and the general assemblies of the Supreme Administrative Court (NSA) and Supreme Court.
The accompanying legislation would have allowed sitting Tribunal judges to declare that they were retiring.
This option would not have applied to people deemed ineligible to adjudicate, known as "double judges."
Tribunal rulings issued by panels including those judges would have been considered "invalid and without legal effect."
Duda, however, referred the laws to the Constitutional Tribunal for preventive review.
In July 2025, the Tribunal ruled that both laws were unconstitutional, arguing in its reasoning that "the assumption of an alleged defect in the election of Tribunal judges has no basis either in the applicable law or in reality."
Latest escalation
The conflict over the Constitutional Tribunal has intensified in recent months following the parliament’s filling of vacancies on the court and President Karol Nawrocki's failure to receive the oaths of some newly elected judges.
In March, the Sejm elected six Constitutional Tribunal judges: Magdalena Bentkowska, Dariusz Szostek, Krystian Markiewicz, Maciej Taborowski, Marcin Dziurda and Anna Korwin-Piotrowska.
So far, only two of them—Bentkowska and Szostek—have been allowed to hear cases after Nawrocki received their oaths.
The president did not invite the other four to take their oaths. His aides said there had been errors in their election.
The four judges took their oaths on April 9 at a ceremony in parliament without Nawrocki's participation.
They have not, however, taken office at the Tribunal because Święczkowski ruled that the parliamentary ceremony could not be regarded as taking the oath "before the president."
In June, Sławomir Patyra was elected as a Constitutional Tribunal judge, and Nawrocki received his oath in late July.
Patyra said, however, that he would not take part in any adjudication proceedings at the Tribunal until the four judges elected by the parliament in March were allowed to hear cases.
The situation escalated further in September after the parliament elected Maciej Berek, a former minister in Tusk’s government, as a Constitutional Tribunal judge.
Nawrocki did not invite him to take the oath. Berek took the oath in parliament on October 14, without the president present. He has not been allowed to adjudicate.
In mid-October, eight Constitutional Tribunal judges elected by the current parliament announced that they would take "all steps provided for by law to restore and ensure the lawful functioning of this important institution."
They said Nawrocki's decision to invite only three of them to the presidential palace was an "arbitrary attempt to select Constitutional Tribunal judges."
In a statement, they said all the judges should be "immediately allowed to hear cases and begin their work."
They said the basis for this was their election by parliament in accordance with the constitution.
The standoff entered another phase of escalation on Friday.
(gs)
Source: PAP