Polish police entered the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw on Friday after protesters gathered outside to oppose the suspension of its president, Bogdan Święczkowski, a deputy justice minister under the former Law and Justice government.
Police said they went onto the court’s premises after incidents outside, including objects thrown at officers, Al Jazeera reported. They described the objects as dangerous. Dozens of officers, riot police among them, guarded the entrance as dozens of demonstrators protested what they saw as a wrongful move by the pro-European government, The Washington Post reported.
The vice president of the tribunal, Bartłomiej Sochański, was suspended along with Mr. Święczkowski. Both were suspended for one month by Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, who cited four legal cases filed against them, Reuters reported. The parliamentary majority behind Prime Minister Donald Tusk elected Judge Korwin-Piotrowska to the tribunal in March.
The tribunal’s leadership rejected the suspension. It said its website had been unlawfully taken over and that Judge Korwin-Piotrowska was not a judge of the court. Everyone involved, the tribunal said on its X account, was “committing the crime of a coup d’état.”
President Karol Nawrocki, an ally of Law and Justice, was in the air when the news broke. He turned his plane around.
“At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am cutting short my flight to Senegal. I am returning,” Mr. Nawrocki wrote on X.
Mr. Tusk said on X that restoring the rule of law was his government’s duty. “After years of lawlessness under PiS, this process is difficult, at times even painful, and requires decisive action,” he wrote, using the party’s Polish initials. “There is no other way.”
Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek told reporters he had sought to lift the immunity of Mr. Święczkowski and his deputy, saying the two had failed in their duties by keeping judges from doing their work, according to Reuters, in a report carried by RTÉ. Law and Justice figures, including the party’s leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, accused the government of staging a coup against the court.
The fight over the tribunal goes back to the Law and Justice years, when the party’s critics accused it of packing the court, and it has left the body all but unable to work. Earlier this year Mr. Nawrocki refused to swear in three of the six judges nominated by Parliament. Mr. Święczkowski, who has led the court since December 2024, refused to let judges elected by the current majority take up their duties.
It was not clear on Friday how long the police would stay at the building or who was in control of the court’s day-to-day work. The suspensions run for one month.