Polish prosecutors have opened an investigation into President Karol Nawrocki and others over an alleged assault on Constitutional Court judges and attempted coercion, Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek announced on Tuesday. The case concerns a group accused of forcibly moving judges away from the court entrance and entering the building during the night from Friday to Saturday. The minister identified the group as Nawrocki and his companions.
The investigation comes amid a widening dispute over the Constitutional Court. The government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk says judges elected by parliament should be able to take up their posts. Nawrocki has refused to receive their oaths, preventing them from joining the court. The president and his supporters say the government’s actions amount to an attempted coup; Tusk presents his position as a defence of the rule of law.
The confrontation escalated after five newly elected judges, previously denied access to the court by its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, entered through a rear entrance on Friday. One of them, senior judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, then temporarily suspended Święczkowski and the court’s vice-president. Nawrocki returned to Warsaw from a planned visit to Senegal and went to the court after midnight, where he told the judges present that they were not constitutional judges. Images of him moving Korwin-Piotrowska aside were widely circulated.
On Tuesday, Nawrocki and Tusk met at a session of the National Security Council. Nawrocki blamed the prime minister for the crisis and accused him of violence and damaging the Polish state. Tusk said legally elected judges must be able to work and offered Nawrocki a private meeting by the end of the week to discuss reducing tensions.
The court’s newly elected judges also took steps to assert their authority. At a general assembly convened by Korwin-Piotrowska, they approved a court budget and selected a disciplinary commission to consider the suspended officials. The legality of those decisions is disputed: the court’s rules require a two-thirds quorum, and Korwin-Piotrowska’s calculation that eight votes were sufficient depends on excluding three judges from the voting count. Legal scholars disagree over whether that approach is valid.
The dispute reflects a broader struggle over the court, which has been politically divided and increasingly unable to function. Poland’s Constitutional Court judges are elected by parliament for single nine-year terms. After the PiS party lost power in 2023, Tusk’s governing coalition used the simple-majority threshold for appointments that PiS had introduced while in office. The country’s next parliamentary election is scheduled for autumn 2027.
Sources: FAZ.