JUDICIAL COUP IN WARSAW: TUSK’S POLICE DESCEND ON CONSTITUTIONAL TRIBUNAL AS PRESIDENT TURNS PLANE AROUND
Police flooded the grounds of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal on Friday after a judge aligned with Donald Tusk’s government claimed threats to staff. Three people were detained for jumping the fence. Officers insisted they stayed outside the building. The official website then posted an order suspending Tribunal President Bogdan Święczkowski and his deputy for a month. The move was signed by Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, a judge elected by the current parliamentary majority who has never been sworn in by the president. She claimed the right to act as the senior judge on the court.
The Tribunal’s own official account on X immediately rejected the posting. It called the website takeover illegal. It stated that Święczkowski remains president, his deputy remains in place, and Korwin-Piotrowska is not a judge of the Tribunal. It warned that everyone involved is committing the crime of a coup d’état.
Jarosław Kaczyński and other opposition figures labeled the events a forced seizure of the court. President Karol Nawrocki, already airborne on a trip to Senegal, ordered the plane turned around over Spain. “At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am cutting short my flight to Senegal. I am returning,” he wrote.
The clash is the latest round in the long fight over who controls the body that decides whether laws comply with the Polish Constitution. Nawrocki has refused to swear in several judges chosen by the current Sejm.
Święczkowski has refused to seat them. Tusk’s government and its allies describe the resistance as obstruction and promise to “restore the rule of law.”
Critics see a raw power grab: police on the grounds, a disputed suspension order, and an attempt to install judges the elected president has not accepted.
Nawrocki is expected back in Warsaw this evening.