MAIN POINTs
1
On October 14, 2026, Maciej Berek, a former minister in the current government of Donald Tusk, read out the oath of a judge of Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (TK) in the office of the Speaker of the Sejm, Włodzimierz Czarzasty, without the participation of the President of the Republic of Poland.
2
The President of the Constitutional Tribunal, Bogdan Święczkowski, did not admit Berek to adjudicate pending a reply from the President of the Republic as to whether he recognizes this oath. The President declared that Berek is not a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal.
3
There are growing concerns that the government may attempt to take control of the Tribunal by force: Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced that the Tribunal’s composition would be completed “by all available means,” Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek, asked whether the police should enter the Tribunal and remove its President, replied “If he breaks the law – yes,” and Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński declared that the police “will intervene” at the Tribunal.
Background: a former minister with disputed qualifications
Since taking power in December 2023, Poland’s ruling coalition led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk has refused to publish the rulings of the Constitutional Tribunal (TK) and has sought to change the Tribunal’s composition by any means available. In March 2026, the Sejm, Poland’s lower house of parliament, elected six new judges to the Tribunal, in a procedure that raised serious doubts as to its compliance with the Sejm’s own Rules of Procedure. The President of the Republic received the oath of two of them, while the remaining four took part in an unlawful “swearing-in” ceremony in the Sejm on April 9, 2026, without the President – before whom, under Polish law, the oath must be taken. As a result, the Tribunal has not admitted them to adjudicate.
On September 4, 2026, the Sejm elected Maciej Berek to the Tribunal to fill the seat of Justice Justyn Piskorski, whose term expired on September 18. Until August 14, 2026, Berek had served as a minister in Donald Tusk’s cabinet, responsible for overseeing the implementation of government policy – and was, in the Prime Minister’s own words, his “right hand.” His nomination openly broke one of the coalition’s flagship promises: a four-year cooling-off period barring former ministers and members of parliament from the Tribunal, which the coalition itself had written into the Constitutional Tribunal Act it passed in 2024 (an act later struck down as unconstitutional on other grounds). Tusk himself admitted that:
some may feel – and do feel – disappointed, because there were supposed to be no former ministers.
Moreover, serious doubts remain as to whether Berek meets the statutory requirements for the office at all: a Tribunal judge must meet the requirements for a judge of the Supreme Court, including at least ten years of practice as an advocate, legal counsel or notary – and the documented periods of Berek’s practice as legal counsel do not appear to reach that threshold.
Instead of dispelling these doubts, the government attacked the President for raising them. Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek accused the President’s Chancellery of “breaking the law,” and denied the President any meaningful role in the procedure – contrary to the position taken by the Constitutional Tribunal itself in its judgment of December 3, 2015 (K 34/15), issued before judges elected by the Law and Justice (PiS) majority came to form a majority on the Tribunal. In that judgment, the Tribunal held that the oath taken before the President is not merely a symbolic ceremony but an act with specific legal effects, and that the President may postpone receiving it where it is beyond doubt that the elected person lacks the legal capacity to assume the office of judge.
The stakes go far beyond a single appointment. The government is seeking to install in the Tribunal persons who have not taken the oath before the President and who – like the ruling majority itself – call into question the legitimacy of the Tribunal’s case law of 2016–2024, including landmark rulings affirming the primacy of the Polish Constitution over EU law and, above all, protecting the life of unborn children. At her Sejm hearing, one of the four, Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, suggested that the Tribunal’s 2020 ruling against eugenic abortion might need to be reconsidered and that courts would have to determine whether it “exists in law.”
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Source of cover photo: Chancellery of the Sejm
