Exclusion of opposition politicians rendered law passed by parliament unconstitutional, finds top court

Poland’s constitutional court has ruled that a bill was passed unconstitutionally due to the exclusion from parliament of two opposition politicians who lost their parliamentary seats after receiving criminal convictions.

The politicians in question, from the national-conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, argue that they were illegitimately excluded and still hold their seats due to being pardoned by President Andrzej Duda, a PiS ally.

The Constitutional Tribunal (TK) has now endorsed that view. Its decision may have further consequences as it seems likely similar rulings will be issued regarding all bills passed without the involvement of the two politicians, including vital budgetary legislation.

However, a deputy speaker of parliament has indicated that they will ignore the TK’s ruling – as they have with others in the past – because the tribunal, which is stacked with appointees from when PiS was in office, is “acting on political orders”.

In January, Duda began referring all bills passed by parliament to the TK due to his “doubts” that they were legally adopted given the exclusion of PiS politicians Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik.

The pair – who served as ministers in the PiS government during its time in power from 2015 to 2023 – were in December handed jail sentences and banned from holding public office after being convicted of abusing their powers.

They argue that those sentences were illegitimate because Duda had previously pardoned them. But those pardons are themselves disputed, with the Supreme Court finding last year that they were issued illegitimately but the TK ruling that the Supreme Court had no right to rule on that issue.

In December, Szymon Hołownia, the speaker of the lower-house Sejm and one of the leaders of Poland’s current ruling coalition, excluded Kamiński and Wąsik from parliament due to their convictions. They appealed against that decision.

In January, one chamber of the Supreme Court ruled that the decision to end Wąsik’s parliamentary mandate was invalid. But a week later, another chamber upheld the decision to end Kamiński’s mandate. However, he argues that that decision was made by a chamber not authorised to rule on the issue.

On Thursday, the TK issued its first ruling on a request by Duda to assess the constitutionality of legislation passed by parliament while Kamiński and Wąsik were excluded.

It found the bill in question – relating to research and higher education – to be invalid due to “a defective formation of the composition of the Sejm which passed the examined law”.

“The unconstitutionality of the reviewed law is caused…by the fact that two MPs, as a result of arbitrary actions of the speaker of the Sejm…were not allowed to participate in the procedure,” said TK in a statement after the publication of the judgment.

“The illegal actions of the speaker of the Sejm had the effect of undermining the will of a particular group of voters who considered that Mariusz Kaminski and Maciej Wąsik should represent the nation,” it added.

In view of this, the court ruled that the bill under review was incompatible with article 7 of the constitution, which requires the authorities to act on the basis and within the limits of the law; article 104, which states that MPs are representatives of the nation; and article 96, which stipulates that the Sejm consists of 460 MPs.

The verdict was reached unanimously by a panel of five judges, two of whom – Krystyna Pawłowicz and Stanisław Piotrowicz – are former PiS MPs who served alongside Kamiński and Wąsik in parliament. Another was the court’s chief justice, Julia Przyłębska, who is a close personal associate of PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński.

The current ruling coalition in the past has argued that it has an obligation to ignore TK rulings passed with the involvement of Pawłowicz and Piotrowicz when they have a conflict of interest as former PiS MPs, and with the involvement of Przyłębska, whose term they argue has legally expired.

In response to yesterday’s verdict, a deputy speaker of the Sejm, Piotr Zgorzelski, told Polsat News that “no one will care about the ruling of the TK, which has lost its impartiality” and “has acted for many years on political orders”.

At this month’s European elections, Kamiński and Wąsik stood as PiS candidates for the European Parliament and both were elected.

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Main image credit: Grzegorz Krzyżewski / BRPO (under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 PL)

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.