Poland's fight over its highest court stopped being a legal argument on Friday night and became a physical one. President Karol Nawrocki cut short a trip to Senegal and flew home after the Constitutional Tribunal's president, Bogdan Święczkowski, and his deputy were suspended for a month by Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska and police secured the court building. After an emergency meeting at the Presidential Palace that ran past midnight, Nawrocki went to the Tribunal itself at about 12:36 a.m. on Saturday and entered the building alongside the First President of the Supreme Court, Zbigniew Kapiński.
What happened inside is disputed in the sharpest possible terms. The President's spokesman says Judges Korwin-Piotrowska and Markiewicz tried to manhandle Nawrocki; Judge Berek accuses the President of physically attacking the two judges, and posted video. Three protesters were detained outside the building. Poland's ambassador to China, Jakub Kumoch, resigned over the events. Both camps accuse the other of breaking the constitution the Tribunal exists to guard — and, as Polish outlets reported it through the night, there is no agreed account even of who laid hands on whom.
Washington is watching its NATO ally's crisis directly. The United States ambassador to Poland, Tom Rose, posted as the confrontation unfolded that "the events unfolding tonight at Poland's Constitutional Tribunal are very serious indeed" — "an unprecedented confrontation over the government's use of state power and the independence and authority of a constitutional institution." Rose said America is on Poland's side, that it is not Washington's place to judge or interfere in its internal affairs, and that the concern is for "the stability, security, and democratic future of a country we are proud to call our friend and ally" — urging everyone involved, officials, police and demonstrators alike, to take a deep breath and avoid any action that could provoke violence or further escalation.
Poland anchors NATO's eastern flank and hosts American troops facing Russia; a constitutional breakdown there is not a local story. For now, the Tribunal stands suspended at the top, its president locked out by his own court, its president of the republic inside the building past midnight — and two irreconcilable accounts of the night, neither withdrawn.
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