Polish parliament selects members of disputed judicial body despite constitutional court injunction

May 18, 2026 | Law, Politics

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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 government’s majority in parliament has selected 15 new members of the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), a disputed body responsible for nominating judges that is at the heart of Poland’s rule-of-law crisis.

Most of the new members were chosen by judges themselves, rather than politicians, as part of the government’s efforts to restore the legitimacy of the KRS.

However, the vote to select them was boycotted by the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party because the Constitutional Tribunal (TK) had issued an injunction ordering that it not take place. The government ignores TK rulings due to the presence on the tribunal of judges unlawfully appointed under the former PiS government.

The legitimacy of the KRS has been in dispute since 2017, when the national-conservative PiS government of the time changed the manner in which the council’s members are appointed. Previously, 15 out of the 25 were chosen by judges themselves. However, following PiS’s reforms, those 15 were selected by parliament.

As before, the remaining ten members of the KRS are made up of: six members of parliament, the justice minister, an appointee of the president, and the heads of the Supreme Court and Supreme Administration Court (NSA).

Expert bodies widely condemned the changes introduced by PiS as undermining judicial independence by giving politicians decisive influence over the KRS. Polish and European court rulings have found the KRS to no longer be a legitimate body as a result.

That has in turn called into question the legitimacy of the thousands of judges appointed by the KRS since it was overhauled – and, by extension, all of the rulings issued by them.

 

The more liberal government that replaced PiS in 2023 has pledged to restore the KRS’s legitimacy. However, its proposed law to bring back the previous system, under which most KRS members were chosen by the judiciary, was vetoed by opposition-aligned President Nawrocki in February.

Given that the terms of KRS members were set to end in May 2026, the ruling coalition launched a “plan B” for selecting new ones. It would involve parliament, where the government has a majority, approving KRS members democratically chosen by judges themselves.

In April, judges held assemblies to select their candidates for the KRS. However, last week, just before parliament was due to vote on appointing new KRS members, the TK issued an injunction ordering that the process be halted until the TK has ruled on a complaint by PiS MPs regarding the constitutionality of the selection procedure.

The ruling coalition ignored that injunction and, on Friday, the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, went ahead with selecting 15 new members of the KRS. The vote was boycotted by all MPs from PiS.

“We will not take part in this vote because these are illegal actions,” declared PiS MP Michał Wójcik, quoted by news website Wirtualna Polska. He warned that there could be “criminal consequences” for those involved in the vote.

The government’s majority voted in favour of 13 KRS candidates chosen by judges themselves. Because, by law, each parliamentary caucus must be allowed to select at least one candidate, the two remaining places were filled by one chosen by PiS, Łukasz Piebiak, and another by the far-right Confederation (Konfederacja), Łukasz Zawadzki.

Piebiak is a controversial choice because, as well as being a judge, he served in the former PiS government and has been accused of coordinating a group of PiS-linked judges who ran an anonymous online smear campaign against colleagues who opposed PiS’s reforms.

“PiS is shooting itself in the foot with Piebiak’s nomination,” justice minister Waldemar Żurek told news website Onet. “He is a discredited person.”

Żurek, however, welcomed the fact that “we elected the maximum number of good judges to the KRS while still complying with the bad law authored by PiS”.

But he acknowledged that the TK and opposition-aligned President Karol Nawrocki, who is responsible for formally appointing judges chosen by the KRS, may “attempt to block” the work of the newly elected KRS, just as they have recently blocked parliament’s selection of four new TK judges.

On Monday morning, the outgoing head of the KRS, Dagmara Pawełczyk-Woicka, who was appointed to the council under PiS and has criticised the current government’s actions, announced that she had stepped down on Friday.

She noted that it is now the duty of the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Małgorzata Manowska, to convene a plenary session to choose a new head of the KRS.

“Whether the chief justice will convene the session in the composition selected by the Sejm on [Friday] (in violation of the law) or in the previous composition, I leave to her decision, added Pawełczyk-Woicka.

Manowska herself was appointed to the Supreme Court by the KRS after it was overhauled by PiS and has also been a critic of the current government. Her term as chief justice is due to end later this month but Nawrocki has not yet chosen her successor.


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.

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

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