Poland heads for constitutional crisis as gov’t bypasses president on judge swearing-in

Poland's long-running rule-of-law crisis entered a dangerous new phase on Thursday after the government moved to swear in four Constitutional Tribunal judges before Parliament rather than the president, prompting President Karol Nawrocki's office to warn that such a move would be invalid.

Zbigniew Bogucki, head of the presidential office, said any judge taking an oath before parliamentary speaker Wlodzimierz Czarzasty instead of the president would be deemed to have relinquished their position on the Constitutional Tribunal.

"Taking the oath before the speaker of the Sejm will be equivalent to renouncing the office of Constitutional Tribunal judge," Bogucki said in a statement.

The unprecedented standoff raises the prospect of Poland ending up with two competing versions of its highest constitutional court: one recognized by the government and Parliament, the other by the president and the conservative opposition.

The four judges were due to take an oath before Czarzasty later on Thursday after Nawrocki refused to swear them in, despite their being elected by Parliament in March.

The government argues that the president has no constitutional right to choose which judges approved by Parliament can take office. Justice Minister Waldemar Zurek has accused Nawrocki of unlawfully blocking the appointments and said the government was considering "various options," including an oath before Parliament, to make the appointments effective.

Nawrocki last week accepted the oath of only two of the six judges chosen by the Sejm: Magdalena Bentkowska and Dariusz Szostek. His office said it was still analyzing whether the other four had been elected properly and argued that swearing in two judges was sufficient to allow the tribunal to function with a full bench.

Bogucki said the remaining four appointments raised "serious doubts" about the parliamentary procedure used to elect them and warned that any attempt to bypass the president would amount to a constitutional violation.

"There is no legal basis for taking the oath before another body," Bogucki said earlier this month. "We would be dealing with both a constitutional delict and a serious criminal offense."

The government rejects that interpretation. Ministers argue that the president's role is ceremonial and that Nawrocki is effectively trying to veto judges selected by the parliamentary majority led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

"The president cannot choose at will whom he wants to see in the Constitutional Tribunal," Zurek told reporters last week.

The dispute threatens to create a dualist Constitutional Tribunal, with one set of judges recognized by the government and another by the president and the opposition. That, in turn, could call into question the validity of future rulings and deepen the legal uncertainty that has surrounded the court since 2015.

The tribunal, which rules on whether laws comply with the Constitution, has been at the center of Poland's conflict with the European Union over judicial independence for more than a decade. After Donald Tusk's coalition came to power in late 2023, it refused to recognize the legitimacy of the existing tribunal, arguing that it had been captured by the previous Law and Justice (PiS) government.

Nawrocki, a PiS-backed president elected last year, has become the main institutional counterweight to Tusk's government. The clash over the tribunal is the latest front in an increasingly open struggle between the two sides, following earlier disputes over the courts, prosecutors and public media.