On Tuesday, 26 August 2025, a meeting of the National Council of the Judiciary began. The agenda included, among other things, reviewing a number of draft bills, but also considering applications for appointment to the office of judge and assistant judge, as well as declarations of intent to continue in office by judges approaching retirement age.
As, pursuant to Article 187(1)(1) of the Constitution, the Minister of Justice is an ex officio member of the National Council of the Judiciary, Waldemar Żurek, who has held this position since last month, also attended the meeting. However, his participation turned out to be exceptionally short and can be compared to the famous anecdote about the Roman politician and orator Cato, who was said to have entered the theatre only to ostentatiously leave it.
Namely, shortly after the meeting began, Minister Żurek took the floor and stated that:
We have a flawed National Council of the Judiciary. This issue has already been decided in a number of rulings by both European courts and Polish legal judges of the Supreme Court.
However, as we have written many times, firstly, the ‘European courts’ do not have the competence to rule on the Polish judicial system, as the Constitutional Tribunal stated in its judgment of 14 July 2021 (P 7/20):
There is no normative act by which the Republic of Poland would transfer to the European Union the right to determine the structure of the courts or to exercise control over judges, and the Constitution does not allow for the transfer of such rights.
What is more, EU institutions themselves have recently admitted that the method of selecting judges who are members of the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS) – by the Sejm – which has been in force since 2018, is not contrary to EU law.
Nevertheless, Minister Żurek went on to emphasise that:
You [members of the KRS] in this composition are jointly responsible for creating such [flawed] positions in the Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court in a procedure that is inconsistent with the Polish Constitution.
At this point, however, it should be noted that the opinion that the actions taken by the current KRS are unconstitutional is completely unfounded. The Constitutional Tribunal – the only body authorised to make binding assessments of this kind – in its judgment of 25 March 2019 (K 12/18) explicitly recognised the current provisions of the Act on the National Council of the Judiciary, regulating the manner of selecting judges who are members of the National Council of the Judiciary, as constitutional. In light of the content of Article 187(1)(2), which in no way specifies how the fifteen members selected from among the judges of the Supreme Court, courts of general jurisdiction, administrative courts and military courts – unlike point 3 of this provision, which explicitly states that four members of the KRS who are members of the Sejm are elected by the Sejm, and two who are senators are elected by the Senate – it is difficult to find any grounds on which the Constitutional Tribunal could rule otherwise.
However, immediately after the above words, Minister Żurek made what was probably the most controversial part of his statement:
I would like to emphasise to you in no uncertain terms that, as Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General, I will use lawful methods to ensure that you leave this building.
It is difficult to say what lawful methods the Minister had in mind. All cases of expiry of the mandate of a member of the National Council of the Judiciary before the end of their term of office are specified in Article 14(1) of the Act on the National Council of the Judiciary and do not depend on the will of the Minister:
The mandate of an elected member of the Council shall expire before the end of their term of office in the event of:
- 1) death;
- 2) resignation from office;
- 3) expiry of the term of office of a member of the Sejm or Senate;
- 4) (repealed)
- 5) expiry or termination of a judge’s employment relationship;
- 6) retirement or transfer of a judge.
Perhaps the Minister was referring to the recently revealed idea to terminate the term of office of the current National Council of the Judiciary by way of a Sejm resolution and to reinstate the persons who sat on the Council at the beginning of 2018. This idea, as we pointed out last week, certainly does not fall within the category of ‘lawful methods’, because, firstly, the Sejm has no legal basis for adopting such resolutions, and secondly, the term of office of KRS members is protected under Article 187(3) of the Constitution:
The term of office of elected members of the National Council of the Judiciary shall be four years.
Furthermore, any attempts to enter the headquarters of the National Council of the Judiciary by force, with the assistance of the police and the public prosecutor’s office, which may have been prepared by last week’s attempt by a representative of the Ministry of Justice to break into the office of the Disciplinary Ombudsman for Judges of Court of General Jurisdiction (which is located in the KRS, as it is this body that, in accordance with the law, provides administrative services to the Ombudsman), cannot be considered lawful. This is evidenced, for example, by the decision of the District Court for Warsaw-Mokotów in Warsaw (which was delivered on the same day as the KRS meeting), which upheld the KRS’s complaint against the order of the prosecutor of the National Prosecutor’s Office, who refused to accept the complaint against the search of the Council in July 2024, during which the door of a security cabinet was broken down.
Perhaps aware of the above circumstances, at the end of his speech, Minister Żurek called on the current composition of the KRS to dissolve itself:
I understand that it is possible to make mistakes in one’s professional life. This is human, but it is diabolical to persist in error, so I appeal to the conscience of the judges, to those who sit here, to consider the consequences of your decisions. It is not too late to dissolve such an entity. I deliberately do not call it a body, because a body is clearly defined in the constitution.
On the one hand, these words may indicate an admission of helplessness on the part of the Minister, who, lacking the means to remove the current members of the National Council of the Judiciary from office, can only appeal to them to voluntarily resign from their positions. On the other hand, comments on the Criminal Code indicate that ‘forcing someone to resign from office (self-dissolution of a collegial body)’ may be considered an act fulfilling the criteria specified in Article 128 § 1. Criminal Code;
Whoever, in order to remove by force a constitutional body of the Republic of Poland, undertakes activities directly aimed at achieving this goal, shall be subject to imprisonment for a term of between 3 and 20 years.
The above issue should be considered in the light of the earlier decision of the government and parliament to deprive the National Council of the Judiciary of all funds allocated for the remuneration of its members in the budget act for 2025, which was deemed unconstitutional by the Constitutional Tribunal in its judgment of 6 May 2025 (K 2/25) as unconstitutional. In this context, the Minister’s statement would not be merely a powerless appeal, but would be part of a series of unlawful actions by Donald Tusk’s government, effectively aimed at forcing judges who are members of the KRS to resign from their positions. These actions should definitely be considered in the light of the above-mentioned provision of the Criminal Code, which, despite obstacles from the government, is being investigated by the public prosecutor’s office.
Returning to the meeting, even before the last statement mentioned above, Minister Żurek declared that he would not take part in the votes scheduled for the meeting, and then left.
The Minister’s behaviour sparked a lot of comments. During the meeting, Judge Anna Dalkowska, a member of the Presidium of the National Council of the Judiciary, pointed out the inconsistency of the Minister, who is currently questioning the status of the National Council of the Judiciary, while previously, as a judge, he participated in competitions conducted by her to fill a vacant judicial position.
The judge also stated that she perceives the issue of possible threats directed at judges as:
Threats coming from the executive branch, from the government, and this is precisely the element of pressure exerted on independent and impartial judges, as well as on a constitutional body of the state.
Even greater inconsistency on the part of Minister Żurek was pointed out after the meeting, when it was recalled that, on the one hand, the Minister believes that:
The mere appearance of a so-called neo-judge in the courtroom, regardless of the substantive judgment handed down
– renders the proceedings defective, but on the other hand, he considers the favourable judgement he obtained in his private case to be beneficial, even though it was handed down by such a judge.
Judge Dagmara Pawełczyk-Woicka, chair of the National Council of the Judiciary, also commented on the Minister’s actions.
In a press interview, she emphasised, among other things, that:
Minister Żurek has no legal means, other than passing a bill and having it signed by the president, to make us leave the National Council of the Judiciary building. My term of office ends in May next year, so I am not glued to this seat. It’s just ridiculous. […] I think that Minister Żurek has already abandoned the idea of forcibly entering the KRS, because it will not bring him any results. He will expose himself to criminal liability, and it will still be completely ineffective and pointless, because he does not have such power. A prosecutor would have to order a search of the National Council of the Judiciary’s headquarters, for example, as has already happened once. However, this does not mean that we would be removed from the building. I don’t really see any legal methods that would allow him to do so. So the only thing he can do is make our lives miserable.
Everything seems to indicate that the recent actions of the new Minister of Justice are primarily theatrical and for show. At the same time, however, as we pointed out above, this does not mean that the government’s previous harassment of the Council, such as the unconstitutional deprivation of its budget, was not unlawful. We can only hope that no new abuses will be added to the list and that those already on it will be properly accounted for.
Image source: Wikipedia.
