Polish government is ‘open’ to EU mediation on court crisis, justice minister says

Polish justice minister Waldemar Żurek told reporters on Thursday (5 November) that the government would be open to EU mediation to resolve its Constitutional Tribunal dispute, but that Brussels had not yet offered such talks and Warsaw had not yet requested them. “We are open to mediation … but it takes two to tango,” Żurek also told a group of reporters at the chancellery of the prime minister in Warsaw. “You need to have a partner to talk to before you reach consensus,” he added. His remarks come after a confrontation over the composition of Poland’s highest court, which arose after rightwing president Karol Nawrocki refused to accept the oaths of judges elected by parliament’s centre-right majority. His decision prompted a senior judge, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, to assume leadership of the Constitutional Tribunal, in a move that has sparked days-long protests in front of the court building by the rightwing opposition party, Law and Justice (PiS) and its supporters. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk wants to “stabilise” the situation and will be holding talks with president Nawrocki, Żurek told reporters, falling short on the details of such talks. “Will there be a breakthrough? We cannot tell the judges that were elected legally [by parliament] to go home,” he also said. Attempts to politicise the court started in 2015 under the previous authoritarian government, led by PiS, which was in office until 2023. Żurek described the Constitutional Tribunal as “the last fortress” for PiS, which had decided that the court was “their property”, he said. The prosecutor's office was also starting to take action against Bogdan Święczkowski, the tribunal’s PiS-aligned official head, who was facing embezzlement charges, and PiS was “afraid” that “their people will face the courts”, Żurek added. Święczkowski, who used to be a chief prosecutor under PiS’s former justice minister, has also been charged with using spyware to target a solicitor in a politically charged case. Material recorded using the spyware system could include private talks with Tusk, the solicitor's client at the time, or discussions of a legal case against PiS’s chairman, Jarosław Kaczyński.