Riot police were deployed outside Poland's Constitutional Court in Warsaw as tensions escalated between Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government and the court's leadership.
Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek requested that the court's President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice-President Bartłomiej Sochański be stripped of immunity so criminal charges can be brought against them. Tusk said the move was necessary to restore the rule of law after what he described as "years of Law and Justice's lawlessness."
The confrontation stems from competing claims over the court's composition. The right-wing Law and Justice party, which governed until recently, appointed judges to secure a majority starting in 2015. European courts subsequently ruled those appointments improper because they duplicated validly filled positions. Tusk's government has used those rulings to stop publishing the court's decisions.
Tusk has tried to reverse those changes but faced obstacles from President Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by Law and Justice. Nawrocki cancelled a trip to Dakar to attend the standoff in Warsaw. He has refused to swear in five judges elected by parliament since March, citing alleged flaws in their selection.
The Constitutional Court said in a social media post that Święczkowski and Sochański remain the court's legally appointed senior justices and accused participants in the government's actions of "committing the crime of a coup d'etat."
Marcin Matczak, a lawyer and critic of the previous judicial reforms, said the immunity removal "has no legal basis for a million reasons" and predicted the armed police presence would damage the rule of law for years.