The Washington Institute for Poland: Poland's Coup Executor: The Judge Who Was Never Sworn Now Illegally Occupies the Tribunal

Every coup has a signature, and Friday's has a name: Anna Korwin-Piotrowska. She is the woman who at about 6 PM on Friday suspended the president and vice-president of Poland's Constitutional Tribunal, announced herself as the court's acting head, and by Saturday evening was issuing orders about who may enter the building — down to barring the court's own president from its grounds. Poland is now governed, in one of its highest institutions, by her signature. So it is worth asking who she is. The answer is the scandal itself: she is a judge the President of the Republic has never sworn in, of a court whose own lawful leadership says she is not its judge at all.

Her path to that doorway runs through one date: March 13, 2026, when the Sejm of Donald Tusk's majority elected her to the Tribunal, together with Marcin Dziurda, Krystian Markiewicz and Maciej Taborowski. Election by the Sejm is half an appointment. The other half — the oath before the President of the Republic — Karol Nawrocki declined to perform, questioning the elections. So the five unsworn judges performed it themselves, in parliament, in his absence, using a formula that claimed the oath had been taken before the president who was not there. Korwin-Piotrowska's entire claim to sit on the Constitutional Tribunal rests on that ceremony: an oath sworn to an empty chair.

Denied the front door of the law, she found a side entrance: seniority. Her claim to lead the court is that she is its longest-serving judge — counting judicial service from September 1, 1995, over three decades in the common courts. Stand back and look at the construction. A woman whose own seat on the Tribunal is unperfected — elected but never sworn — declares herself, by arithmetic of years served in other courts, the senior judge of a court she has never lawfully joined, and from that invented seniority derives the power to suspend the court's president, a man appointed to his office by the President of the Republic and confirmed in it by years of service on the bench she claims to outrank. Seniority among judges presupposes that you are one. That is the step her paperwork always skips.

Then there is the statute she reached for. Her suspension orders invoke Article 130 of the law on the organization of the common courts — not the Constitutional Tribunal's own act — a provision for pulling a judge from duty for up to a month in specified circumstances. And even that borrowed statute refuses to say what she needs it to say: its own text assigns the suspension of a court's president to the minister of justice, not to a self-declared senior colleague. Whether the framework extends to the Constitutional Tribunal at all, and whether she may wield it against the Tribunal's president, no court had determined as of this weekend. She did not wait for a court to determine it. She also accused Święczkowski, in those orders, of blocking the General Assembly, excluding her five colleagues from cases and manipulating panels — allegations written by the accuser, in a document she signed herself, never tested at any hearing. Prosecutor, judge and beneficiary, in one signature.

What she did with the power tells you what the power was for. On Friday she announced the suspensions on the court's own website — which then went dark while the court's official account called the events a coup d'état. On Saturday evening she formalized the occupation: Święczkowski and Sochański, she ordered, are not entitled to enter the Tribunal building; their access will be arranged separately, later, on her terms. The remaining judges were told to work away from the seat of the court. The Tribunal's chancellery staff had their duties suspended — with pay, the classic arrangement by which an institution is emptied without the inconvenience of firing anyone. The registry office was halted. And for Tuesday she convened the General Assembly, signing as the substitute for a president she had suspended, to pass a budget — and, if the government's justice minister gets his stated wish, to strip the two men she displaced of their immunity so prosecutors can charge them.

And she was not a remote signatory to Friday night; she was in the doorway. When Nawrocki — having turned his aircraft around over Spain and flown home through the night — reached the Tribunal, the recording captured the constitutional crisis in one exchange. "We are judges of the Constitutional Tribunal," she told him. His answer is the sentence her whole construction cannot survive: "You are not Constitutional Tribunal judges." Her colleague Maciej Berek then posted video claiming the president had physically attacked her and the others — the now-standard inversion, in which the people blocking the door accuse the man who walked through it. Święczkowski, turned away from that same building again on Sunday morning, said of her in plain words that she has never been a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal and that everything done on her orders is illegal.

Consider what Poland is being asked to accept. The head of its highest court tonight is a person no president swore, wielding a statute written for other courts, under seniority counted from a career spent elsewhere, suspending men whose appointments nobody disputes were completed — and doing it all, her defenders say, in the name of the rule of law. The European Commission blessed the Sejm's right to elect her. Nobody in Brussels has yet explained by what right she governs. That explanation does not exist, because the appointment was never finished — and the one man constitutionally empowered to finish it is the man she tried to keep standing in the street outside his own country's court.

There is a reason the oath exists, and Friday night is the reason. It is the moment an elected name becomes a judge — the moment power is handed over in the open, by the head of state, before the nation. Anna Korwin-Piotrowska skipped that moment and took the power anyway. Everything since — the suspensions, the barred doors, the silenced staff, Tuesday's assembly — is built on that skipped moment. Pull it out, and the whole structure is what the Tribunal's own account called it on Friday night. Not a court. A coup with a signature block.

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0T5su9P1ZykW5wXh4bAXJGrb8iDG7ptrzdSE3fQRj3hxgM8M3N7XDbZtrBzwfNmfYl&id=100070787426594