Poland's top court descends into chaos as president forces way in after midnight standoff

Poland's long-running fight over control of its Constitutional Tribunal turned physical overnight on October 30 into October 31, when a judge aligned with Prime Minister Donald Tusk's governing coalition ordered the court's chief justice suspended, riot police surrounded the tribunal's Warsaw headquarters, and President Karol Nawrocki cut short a trip abroad to force his way into the building after midnight. Both sides accused the other of mounting an illegal power grab.

Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, one of several judges elected by the Sejm, Poland's lower house, but never sworn in by the president, announced on the evening of October 30 that she was suspending chief justice Bogdan Święczkowski and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, for one month and filing motions to strip them of their judicial immunity. The tribunal's own website briefly confirmed the suspension before going offline. Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek said he had separately applied to lift the pair's immunity.

Seven months of blocked oaths

The immediate flashpoint sits atop a much longer dispute. In March 2026 the Sejm, where Tusk's coalition holds a majority, elected six new tribunal judges to fill long-vacant seats. Official voting records published by the Sejm show the chamber passed all six nominations by comfortable margins. Nawrocki swore in only two of them, Magdalena Bentkowska and Dariusz Szostek, arguing that just two seats had genuinely opened during his presidency. The other four judges elected that day — Marcin Dziurda, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, Krystian Markiewicz and Maciej Taborowski — took an alternative oath before parliament instead, after the president declined repeated requests to receive them. Chief justice Święczkowski refused to let them hear cases, telling reporters he could not "recognise them as judges" despite having publicly congratulated all six on their election.

The dispute widened in September, when the Sejm elected Maciej Berek, a former minister in Tusk's own chancellery, to a seventh tribunal seat. A transcript of that day's session shows lawmakers debating the nomination amid opposition complaints that the government was "politicising" the court. Nawrocki again withheld the oath; Berek again took his before parliament, on October 14, prompting scuffles between police and protesters outside the tribunal that foreshadowed last week's confrontation.

Poland's Constitutional Tribunal has been at the centre of the country's rule-of-law disputes since 2015, when the then-governing Law and Justice party packed the court with judges whose appointments the European Court of Justice later found violated EU law. The European Union suspended billions of euros in pandemic-recovery funds over the episode and opened formal proceedings against Warsaw, both resolved only after Tusk's coalition took power in late 2023 and pledged to restore judicial independence. The current fight is, in large part, a continuation of that unfinished business: the government regards Święczkowski's tribunal, as currently composed, as unlawful, while the president and his allies regard the parliament-sworn judges the same way.

A disputed confrontation after midnight

President Nawrocki, who was flying to Senegal at the time, turned his plane around. After an emergency meeting at the Presidential Palace, a presidential convoy left for the tribunal shortly after midnight, where riot police had already cordoned off the building. What happened at the entrance is disputed in its particulars but not in its outline. Maciej Berek, the minister-turned-tribunal-judge whom Nawrocki has refused to swear in, wrote on social media that the president "crashed into" Korwin-Piotrowska and "began to push his way through the group of other judges" at the door, and said that nobody laid a hand on the president in return. Presidential spokesman Rafał Leśkiewicz gave the opposite account, saying the judges blocking the entrance had violated the president's personal inviolability and describing Berek's own account of the incident as evidence of "a crime." Nawrocki himself was recorded telling Korwin-Piotrowska and two colleagues, "You are not judges of the Constitutional Tribunal," as he pushed past them into the building.

Police, protests and claims of a 'coup'

Several hundred protesters gathered outside the tribunal through the night and into Saturday, after police — some of them riot-equipped — cordoned off the building. Crowds split along familiar lines, with some chanting against Tusk and others praying with rosaries in a vigil for the old court leadership.

The tribunal's official account on social media, still under Święczkowski's control, described the suspension attempt as a "coup d'état," a characterisation echoed by Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of the opposition Law and Justice party, and by Zbigniew Ziobro, the former justice minister, who called it a "blatant, criminal attack." Not every opposition figure took that line: Szymon Hołownia, leader of the junior coalition party Poland 2050, said Święczkowski had turned the tribunal into "a caricature" of a court but warned that the forced suspension "deepens the decline" of the institution and called for compromise instead.

Legal scholars were similarly split. Several retired tribunal presidents — Marek Safjan, Jerzy Stępień, Bohdan Zdziennicki and Andrzej Zoll — publicly backed Korwin-Piotrowska's move. Other constitutional lawyers, including Marcin Matczak, said the suspension had no basis in the tribunal's own statute, which does not provide any mechanism for removing a sitting president of the court this way; opponents also noted that, under the tribunal's ordinary succession rules, a more senior judge, Wojciech Sych, would normally have stood in for Święczkowski, not Korwin-Piotrowska.

Tusk addressed the country in a televised statement on the afternoon of October 31, defending the move as overdue and rejecting calls for a middle path. "The attack on the Tribunal and its judges is another chapter in the destruction of the rule of law in Poland by PiS and by presidents Duda and Nawrocki," Tusk said, according to the transcript of his address published by the prime minister's office, adding that the tribunal "in the shape PiS imposed on it is not a genuine court" and that reform efforts had been "completely blocked by the president and PiS."

"The attack on the Tribunal and its judges is another chapter in the destruction of the rule of law in Poland by PiS and by presidents Duda and Nawrocki." — Prime Minister Donald Tusk, televised address, October 31, 2026

The crisis has also drawn in Europe's main rule-of-law watchdog. The Council of Europe's Venice Commission adopted an opinion on October 9–10 on the Polish president's power over judicial oaths; news organisations including Brussels Signal reported that it urged Nawrocki to swear in the remaining judges, while his spokesman noted the Commission's opinions are advisory and not binding. The European Court of Human Rights had already ordered, in a separate interim measure, that the four April judges be allowed to take up their posts — an order Święczkowski's tribunal has declined to enforce, arguing the Strasbourg court has no jurisdiction over the matter.

What happens next

Nawrocki's party left the tribunal a little before 5 a.m. on October 31 without resolving who controls the building. Korwin-Piotrowska ordered judges loyal to her to work from outside the building "for security reasons" and suspended several tribunal offices; the tribunal's own spokeswoman, Weronika Ścibor, said Sochański's suspension was simply "non-existing" and that he remained in charge. Early reporting from Saturday described the two sides effectively operating as rival versions of the same court.

Nawrocki spent Saturday meeting party leaders across the spectrum — from the junior coalition partners to Kaczyński's Law and Justice and the far-right Confederation — in what his office described as an effort to "restore constitutional order," though the governing Civic Coalition and New Left declined to attend. A general assembly of tribunal judges to set next year's budget is scheduled for November 3, a date now expected to double as the next flashpoint.

• October 30, evening: Judge Korwin-Piotrowska orders Święczkowski and Sochański suspended for one month; riot police move in around the tribunal.
• October 31, shortly after midnight: President Nawrocki's convoy arrives at the tribunal after an emergency meeting at the Presidential Palace.
• October 31, a little before 5 a.m.: Nawrocki's party leaves the building without resolution.
• November 3 (scheduled): A general assembly of tribunal judges on the 2027 budget is expected to be the next test of which side controls the court.