Supreme Court rules Polish government unlawfully removed judicial officials

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

The Supreme Court has ruled that Poland’s current justice minister, Waldemar Żurek, and his immediate predecessor, Adam Bodnar, acted unlawfully in firing three key judicial officials, who were appointed under the former Law and Justice (PiS) government, before their terms ended.

The court’s professional liability chamber found that the ministers had acted “without a proper legal basis”, which cannot be “accepted in a democratic state government by the rule of law”.

Żurek, however, argues that the chamber itself, which was created when PiS was in power, is “improperly established”, suggesting that he will ignore its ruling.

The case concerns a long-running dispute over three judges, Piotr Schab, Przemysław Radzik, and Michał Lasota, appointed under the PiS government to serve as disciplinary officers in cases against fellow judges. They were seen as playing a key role in PiS’s efforts to bring the judiciary under greater political control.

PiS lost power in December 2023, but the trio remained in their positions, as their four-year terms were due to run until June 2026. However, in April last year, Bodnar dismissed Schab and Radzik. Then, when Bodnar was replaced by Żurek in July, one of the new justice minister’s first actions was to remove Lasota from his position.

Bodnar and Żurek argued that, because the relevant regulations do not provide any means for the premature removal of disciplinary officers, the body that appointed them has the authority to dismiss them if there are compelling reasons to do so.

They said that removing the trio was justified by a series of disciplinary proceedings initiated against them and by their “groundless” actions against judges who were critical of the changes introduced under the former PiS government.

That position has, however, now been decisively rejected by the professional liability chamber of Poland’s Supreme Court, which found that a public authority may not act unless it is expressly authorised to do so by statute.

“This rule does not provide for any exceptions,” the chamber wrote in its justification, quoted by the Gazeta Wyborcza daily. “Competence cannot be presumed.”

The chamber also rejected the legitimacy of the individuals appointed last year to replace the unlawfully removed officials. “Only one person can hold such a position at a time. Therefore, it is not possible to appoint a new [person] to a position that is already occupied,” they wrote.

“In a democratic state governed by the rule of law, it is unacceptable for courts to accept actions by public authorities undertaken without a proper legal basis,” declared the chamber.

Asked by a journalist at a press conference to comment on the ruling, Żurek claimed that the professional liability chamber is an “improperly established chamber” whose legality is “questioned by many lawyers”.

That is because it contains some judges who were improperly appointed to the Supreme Court under PiS’s judicial reforms and others who were “instrumentally chosen” by former PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda.

“When we create a court based on an individual decision by a politician, the case law we have may already reveal that it is not a court at all,” said Żurek, quoted by news website wPolityce.

However, both wPolityce and Gazeta Wyborcza note that the ruling in question was issued by so-called “old” judges who were appointed to the Supreme Court before PiS’s politicisation of the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), which rendered subsequent appointments invalid.

From the outset, Schab, Radzik and Lasota did not accept their dismissals, considering themselves to be still legally serving as disciplinary officers. As a result, they continued to occupy their offices and refused to hand over documentation relating to disciplinary cases involving judges.

In an interview with television station wPolsce24, Schab said that his dismissal showed that “the executive branch is destroying the independence of the judiciary” and that the fixed term of office for a disciplinary officer “is intended to protect the independence of judges from the executive branch”.

Last week, police and prosecutors entered Schab, Radzik and Lasota’s offices and demanded that the head of the secretariat hand over their case files. However, after they refused to do so, “it became necessary to open them mechanically”, say prosecutors.

In response to the raid, PiS-aligned President Karol Nawrocki said that the development was “very concerning”. However, Żurek described it as a “routine action” necessitated by the fact that the disciplinary officers had not handed over the documents after they were dismissed.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Image credits: Paweł Mazurek / MS (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.