Riot police deployed as Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal dispute escalates

Riot police were deployed outside Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw on Friday as a dispute over the court’s leadership intensified between Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s centrist government and the opposition Law and Justice party, or PiS.

Hundreds of PiS supporters gathered after judges elected by the current parliamentary majority announced the suspension of tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice-President Bartłomiej Sochański. Al Jazeera reported that police arrested three people who attempted to enter the court complex.

Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek has also requested that the two senior judges be stripped of immunity so they can face criminal charges for allegedly preventing five judges elected by parliament since March from hearing cases. President Karol Nawrocki, a PiS ally who has declined to swear in those judges over alleged procedural flaws, turned his plane around while travelling to Senegal and returned to Poland.

The tribunal said Święczkowski and Sochański remained its legally appointed leaders and accused those involved in the actions against them of committing a coup. Tusk defended the measures as necessary to restore the rule of law after PiS’s changes to the judiciary during its years in government.

European courts have previously ruled that three PiS-era tribunal judges were improperly appointed and that the court was no longer an independent and impartial tribunal. Tusk’s government has relied on those rulings to stop publishing the tribunal’s decisions, while presidential vetoes have hindered efforts to reverse the earlier changes.