Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal is now operating under two rival claims to authority. On 30 October, Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska suspended the tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, for a month — a decision they rejected.
Police were called to the tribunal’s grounds, opposition politicians described the episode as a possible “state coup”, and President Karol Nawrocki cut short his journey to Senegal. But the confrontation is not simply a clash between officials. It is the latest expression of a deeper dispute over which judges are entitled to sit, who can run the court and how Poland’s constitutional order should be interpreted.
A court with two claimed chains of command
Korwin-Piotrowska, a judge elected by the current Sejm, ordered the immediate suspension of Święczkowski and Sochański. The measure was to last one month. The tribunal’s website then published information indicating that she had taken over its leadership.
The existing leadership refused to recognise the move. A statement published through the tribunal’s official account on X said the website had been unlawfully taken over. It maintained that Święczkowski and Sochański retained their powers and challenged Korwin-Piotrowska’s own status as a judge.
That response turned a disputed personnel decision into a fight over the institution’s authority to speak and act. Korwin-Piotrowska presents her intervention as necessary to restore the tribunal’s work. Her opponents regard it as a decision without legal force.
The practical consequence is a split command. The two sides do not merely disagree about who should occupy the top offices; they reject the legal premises on which the other side bases its claim.
Why the police were called
Korwin-Piotrowska asked the police to attend, warning of a possible threat to the lives and health of judges and employees and of a risk to public order.
The police confirmed that officers were carrying out activities on the tribunal’s premises. They also made clear that their personnel were on the grounds, but not inside the building.
That distinction matters. Opponents of the leadership change have accused services answerable to Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s government of attempting a forceful intervention in a judicial institution. The police presence shows that the confrontation had become serious enough to require security measures, but it does not settle the underlying legal dispute or establish that the building was seized by force.
Both camps say they are defending the tribunal’s proper functioning. One says the institution risks paralysis unless its leadership is changed; the other says the attempted change is itself the source of the crisis.
“State coup” is a political allegation, not a settled finding
Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the opposition Law and Justice party, called the events an attack on the Constitutional Tribunal. He accused government-controlled services of trying to intervene forcibly.
Other opponents of the leadership change also used the phrase “state coup”. That is the political and legal interpretation advanced by participants in the confrontation, not an established judicial classification of what happened. The facts show an open struggle over control of the tribunal; they do not, by themselves, resolve which side has acted lawfully.
The dispute nonetheless reached the presidential office. Nawrocki ordered his return from Senegal after his chancellery confirmed that the decision was linked to developments at the tribunal. His journey was interrupted; the account does not suggest that negotiations in the West African country had already been completed.
The fault line runs back to judicial appointments
The immediate confrontation is rooted in a longer argument over the tribunal’s composition. Some judges elected by the current parliamentary majority took their oath in the Sejm without the president taking part. The tribunal’s leadership did not consider that procedure sufficient for them to begin exercising their functions.
The parliamentary side takes the opposite view. It argues that the Sejm elects constitutional judges and that the president’s role is to receive their oath. On that reading, the president’s absence from the ceremony cannot indefinitely prevent the judges from taking office.
The disagreement therefore concerns more than individual appointments. It affects the legitimacy of decisions made by the tribunal and the authority of the people who make them. If one camp regards certain judges as fully entitled to participate while the other rejects their status, any ruling involving them can become vulnerable to challenge.
That is also why the leadership question cannot be separated from the membership dispute. Korwin-Piotrowska’s authority depends on a particular understanding of who is properly sitting on the tribunal and how its internal rules operate. Święczkowski and Sochański’s position rests on rejecting that understanding. Each side can consequently portray the other’s actions as an assault on the legal order rather than as a routine institutional change.
A legal argument with no agreed arbiter
Korwin-Piotrowska has justified the suspension by saying that the tribunal’s ability to work must be restored. Whether she had the power to remove its president and deputy is itself contested.
Legal opinions are divided. Some jurists reject the measure’s legal basis, while others believe arguments may exist to support it but stress that the issue requires closer examination. The disagreement is especially consequential because the same institutional crisis affects the bodies that might otherwise be expected to clarify it.
In a functioning system, a disputed decision can be referred to an authority whose competence is accepted by the parties. Here, the legitimacy of judges, the legality of the suspension and the right to direct the tribunal are all being challenged at once.
Poland has therefore not witnessed a completed transfer of power at the Constitutional Tribunal, but an unresolved contest in which both sides claim to be preserving legality. The immediate question is not simply who occupies the president’s office. It is who can keep the tribunal working on a legal foundation that the rival institutions and officials will recognise.
