Poland’s Rule of Law Recession: Precedents of EU Judicial Coups, Bot Claims and Circular Irony

A sharp conflict has erupted in Poland over the Constitutional Tribunal, which has become a striking example of the rule of law crisis in the European Union. The events unfolding in Warsaw are reminiscent of precedents of “judicial coups” in other EU countries.

Last June I called Poland’s predicament a perfect Catch-22: a pro-EU prime minister with a programme, and a sovereigntist president with a veto pen. I expected a long, grinding stalemate until the 2027 elections. I did not expect riot shields.

Friday Night in Warsaw

On the evening of Friday, 30 October 2026, Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska announced that the Constitutional Tribunal’s president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, were suspended for a month. She would run the court herself, on the grounds that her overall years of judicial service made her the senior judge. The cited basis was a provision of the law on common courts, which lets a court president or the justice minister sideline a judge caught committing an offence. Constitutional scholar Marcin Matczak pointed out the obvious: the justice minister has no oversight over this Tribunal, so the provision does not fit.

Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek, who is also prosecutor general, then moved to strip both men of immunity. The motions were reportedly delivered to Korwin-Piotrowska herself. So, the judge who suspends is also the judge who receives the request to prosecute. A tidy circle, isn’t it?

Riot police ringed the building. Seven of the eight judges the Sejm has elected this year were escorted in by State Protection Service officers, through a gate connected to the prime minister’s chancellery. Sochański was kept out. President Karol Nawrocki, who was flying to Senegal, turned his plane around, reached the court during the night and was involved in scuffles at the entrance. He called it a forcible takeover of a constitutional organ. Jarosław Kaczyński announced a police state. Donald Tusk answered that restoring the rule of law is a duty, that it is painful, and that there is no other way.

Those eight judges are the root of the quarrel. Nawrocki swore in three and refused five, citing flaws in their selection. The five swore themselves in inside parliament, and Święczkowski refused to seat them. Supporters of the president call his refusals a constitutional prerogative, and critics call them obstruction. Either way, it is a dispute for a court to settle, and the court is the very thing in question. That is the Catch-22 I described, now with a police cordon.

In 2015 the outgoing majority elected five judges on the eve of defeat, and PiS refused to seat three of them, replacing them with its own picks. Brussels was right to object to that. Whether the cure may include a police operation timed for the president’s flight is a question on which even scholars sympathetic to the goal, such as Matczak, have warned that the method could become a template for the next government.

Everyone Has a Precedent

Analysts like to present this as a regional “rule of law recession”, a slump in judicial independence spreading from Budapest to Bratislava to Warsaw. They are right about the pattern, though not in the direction they usually........

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