- On September 8, 2026, the Chamber of Professional Responsibility of Poland’s Supreme Court set aside a judgment of the disciplinary court at the Court of Appeal in Gdańsk, holding that the court had been improperly composed because the Minister of Justice had assigned the duties of disciplinary judges without the opinion of the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ) required by statute.
- The same day, the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs issued three rulings confirming that Dariusz Korneluk is not the National Prosecutor — a line opened by resolution I KZP 3/24 and confirmed by the Constitutional Tribunal in case SK 13/24.
- The courts have not yet spoken on the Academy of Justice (AWS), whose Rector, Michał Sopiński, Ph.D., Minister Waldemar Żurek claims to have dismissed despite serious procedural doubts. On September 10, 2026, the police refused to intervene at the request of the minister’s nominee, who was attempting to take over the university.
The rulings described below belong to a longer sequence. In January 2024, the government of Donald Tusk replaced Poland’s National Prosecutor — the official who in practice directs the prosecution service — in breach of the Law on the Public Prosecutor’s Office. On January 12, 2024, Justice Minister Adam Bodnar handed Dariusz Barski a document declaring that his 2022 appointment had “produced no legal effects,” bypassing the written consent of the President of the Republic that the Act requires for a dismissal. The same day the Prime Minister “entrusted the duties” of National Prosecutor to Jacek Bilewicz, in a procedure the Act does not provide for, and on March 14, 2024, appointed Dariusz Korneluk to the office without the opinion of the President required by law.
Korneluk then carried out a wave of personnel changes in the prosecution service — appointments, secondments and removals whose validity depends on the validity of his own. In parallel, the Ministry of Justice has since 2024 been replacing court presidents and vice-presidents and the disciplinary prosecutors for judges, again without the procedures the law prescribes: Minister Bodnar removed officials the statute gives him no power to remove, and his successor Waldemar Żurek announced some 45 dismissals of court presidents and vice-presidents while ignoring negative opinions of the court colleges of judges and skipping the referral to the National Council of the Judiciary that a negative opinion triggers. The court decisions described in this article are the legal consequence of those choices.
The same pattern is repeating itself yet again. An office in the justice system is held by a person appointed in accordance with the law. The Minister of Justice nevertheless decides — usually on the strength of his own reading of the rules, unsupported by any court ruling — that the appointment was ineffective, or simply announces, with no legal basis and on doubtful factual grounds, that the incumbent has been dismissed. He then installs his own nominee in the same post, insisting against the evidence that the new appointment is valid, even though the courts say precisely the opposite. The past weeks brought several demonstrations of this mechanism.
No effective assignment of disciplinary judges without the National Council of the Judiciary’s opinion
On Tuesday, September 8, 2026, the Chamber of Professional Responsibility of Poland’s Supreme Court, sitting under the presidency of the Chamber’s President Maria Szczepaniec, heard a district court judge’s appeal against a judgment of the disciplinary court at the Court of Appeal in Gdańsk of April 8, 2025, which had imposed a reprimand on him. The Supreme Court set that judgment aside not because of its content, but because the Gdańsk court lacked the capacity to adjudicate at all: the bench of the disciplinary court was improperly composed, because it included judges to whom the Minister of Justice had assigned those duties in disregard of the required procedure — that is, without the opinion of the National Council of the Judiciary (NCJ).
The Law on the System of Common Courts leaves the minister no discretion here. Article 110a § 1 provides:
The Minister of Justice shall assign the duties of a judge of the disciplinary court at a court of appeal to a judge of the common courts having at least ten years’ service in the office of judge, after seeking the opinion of the National Council of the Judiciary.
The phrase after seeking the opinion is not a loose suggestion but part of the very structure of the power conferred: the minister may act only after discharging his duty to consult. The Council’s opinion is not binding — he may decide against it — but that does not mean he is free not to seek it at all. Relying on the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment of November 7, 2013 (ref. K 31/12), the Supreme Court restated a rule that is simple and hard to contest: where the duty to seek an opinion follows from a statute, a failure to discharge it renders the resulting decision defective. This is not formalism but the principle of legality laid down in Article 7 of Poland’s Constitution — a public authority acts on the basis of and within the limits of the law, and may not set aside selected fragments of the rules because it prefers to pretend that constitutional bodies it has not staffed itself do not exist.
The consequences of this ruling reach far beyond the case of one judge. An improperly composed bench is an absolute ground for appeal — a defect that an appellate court takes into account regardless of the scope of the appeal and of any effect on the content of the ruling. Where the minister assigned the duties of disciplinary judges without the Council’s opinion — and this was not the only case of its kind — every ruling issued with their participation remains open to challenge. What arises is precisely the state of affairs against which Ordo Iuris warned from the very beginning of the so-called “restoration of the rule of law” by the EU-backed government of Donald Tusk: chaos in which a citizen does not know whether the judgment in his own case will stand.
The Ordo Iuris Institute had in fact already flagged the appointment of disciplinary courts without the NCJ opinion required by law in its report “How to End the Rule-of-Law Crisis in Poland”. The Institute argued there that all disciplinary rulings handed down with the participation of defectively appointed judges should be set aside by operation of law and the proceedings reopened, and that both those who accepted such functions and those who conferred them should face criminal liability.
The Disciplinary Prosecutor for Judges: a markedly ambiguous position from the Supreme Court
In the margin of the same case the Supreme Court resolved one further question — and here the assessment must be distinctly ambiguous. The Chamber refused to allow Judge Przemysław Radzik to take part in the proceedings as Deputy Disciplinary Prosecutor for Judges of the Common Courts, holding that his term had come to an end and that since June 16, 2026, those duties have been performed by persons appointed by the then Minister of Justice, Adam Bodnar. Radzik himself commented that he profoundly disagreed with the ruling, but respected it.
The Supreme Court’s position is hard to reconcile with itself. In one and the same case the Chamber denies effect to the minister’s assignment of the duties of disciplinary judges while recognizing the validity of his appointment of the disciplinary prosecutors — that is, of the accusers in those very proceedings. It would be difficult to find a sharper illustration of how unsettled the law around disciplinary justice has become.
The Chamber reasoned that the statute sets the minister no deadline for appointing the Disciplinary Prosecutor, so that in theory he may act even before his predecessor’s term expires. Even on that reading — which carries an evident potential for abuse — there is a difference between appointing a successor whose appointment takes effect only when the incumbent’s term ends, and insisting publicly that it took effect at once. The court’s motives are understandable: by the time it ruled, the minister could already have made a lawful appointment, and the Chamber appears to have sought to cure his decision and cut short the dispute. Care must be taken, however, that its position is not used as an argument that his actions were lawful from the outset, and thus as a route to escaping responsibility for them.
The Supreme Court again: Dariusz Korneluk is not the National Prosecutor
On the same day, September 8, 2026, the Chamber of Extraordinary Control and Public Affairs of the Supreme Court heard appeals by prosecutors against decisions of the Prosecutor General refusing consent to their remaining in office beyond retirement age. According to reports that appeared the following day, the rulings confirmed that Dariusz Korneluk is not the National Prosecutor.
Such a finding is nothing new in the case law. Recall that on January 12, 2024, Justice Minister Adam Bodnar handed Dariusz Barski a document stating that his appointment as National Prosecutor “had produced no legal effects,” bypassing the written consent of the President of the Republic that the Law on the Public Prosecutor’s Office requires for a dismissal. The same day the Prime Minister “entrusted the duties” of National Prosecutor to Jacek Bilewicz — in a procedure the Act does not know at all — and on March 14, 2024, appointed Dariusz Korneluk to the office without, as it happens, the opinion of the President required by law. We have written repeatedly about the unlawful appointment of the National Prosecutor and about the takeover of the National Prosecutor’s Office.
The courts have assessed this unequivocally. By its resolution of September 27, 2024 (ref. I KZP 3/24), the Supreme Court held that Dariusz Barski’s reinstatement to service and his appointment as National Prosecutor in 2022 had a legal basis and were effective. On November 27, 2024, the Criminal Chamber declined to adopt separate resolutions in the Korneluk and Bilewicz cases (I KZP 6/24 and I KZP 7/24), pointing to the defective wording of the questions referred — which means that the September resolution stands. Barski’s position was also confirmed by the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment of November 22, 2024 (ref. SK 13/24). Finally, on September 2, 2026, the Chamber of Professional Responsibility discontinued disciplinary proceedings against a prosecutor, holding that the appeal had not come from a properly authorized body, since the disciplinary prosecutor had been designated with Dariusz Korneluk’s participation.
We are therefore dealing not with a single, isolated ruling but with settled case law of three chambers of the Supreme Court and of the Constitutional Tribunal. And what is called into question is not only Dariusz Korneluk’s personal status but, in consequence, the acts of the prosecutors he appointed to their present posts or designated to act in particular cases.
The Ordo Iuris Institute raised this point in the same report: appointments, secondments and removals made by Jacek Bilewicz and Dariusz Korneluk are ineffective ex tunc, the persons concerned never effectively acquired the status conferred on them, and the same ineffectiveness extends down the resulting chain of authority to the decisions of prosecutors whose own position rested on a defective appointment. The court’s assessment converges substantially with those conclusions.
The Academy of Justice: the courts have not yet had the last word
The dispute over the office of Rector of the Academy of Justice (AWS) is of a somewhat different character. Here no court ruling has yet been handed down — but the past few days have been eventful enough to warrant mention.
The Academy of Justice is a university supervised by the Minister of Justice, whose Rector-Commandant is Michał Sopiński, Ph.D. On May 28, 2026, Minister Waldemar Żurek issued a decision dismissing him from that office, relying on Article 432(5) of the Law on Higher Education and Science and alleging irregularities in doctoral proceedings, a breach of the requirement of political neutrality, and shortcomings in the organization of training. Those grounds are questionable at best. First, that Act refers the minister’s power to dismiss the Rector to the Law on the Prison Service, under which a rector is dismissed before the end of his term by the university senate — no analogous power is conferred on the Minister of Justice. Second, the alleged breach of the requirement of political neutrality sounds in substance like a complaint that the Rector did not applaud the unlawful actions of the present and the previous Minister of Justice. Third, the decision came the day after Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal had granted an interim measure, by its order of May 27, 2026 (ref. K 11/26), calling on the minister to refrain from any steps aimed at suspending or dismissing the Rector-Commandant. The university has consistently maintained that Sopiński holds the office without interruption; the Rector further argues that the decision was never properly served on him and so can produce no legal effects.
Matters came to a head on Thursday, September 10, 2026. At about 9:30 a.m., Sławomir Cudak, Ph.D., arrived at the Academy accompanied by Prison Service officers, stating that he held a decision signed by the minister entrusting him with the duties of Rector-Commandant. Staff did not let him into the rectorate — and, notably, the police refused to intervene, explaining that they could not verify on the spot whether he was entitled to enter. The same day the Academy’s authorities terminated Cudak’s employment contract without notice for a grave breach of basic employee duties. He nevertheless returned the following day and, by the end of it, succeeded in taking control of the university, issuing a communiqué announcing that he had been performing the duties of Rector-Commandant since September 9, 2026.
Everything indicates that this case, too, will have to end in court — this time, in the first instance, before an administrative court examining the legality of the minister’s decision. A ruling of the Constitutional Tribunal in the already-cited case K 11/26 is also still awaited, on whether the provisions the Minister of Justice invokes in order to dismiss the Rector-Commandant apply to the Academy of Justice at all. In the meantime, six legal organizations have issued a joint position on the ministry’s actions toward the Academy and its Rector-Commandant, marshalling a broad range of arguments against the minister’s conduct and invoking in particular the constitutional principle of university autonomy (Article 70(5)).
Conclusion
Three cases, three different areas — and one common denominator. Each time, Donald Tusk’s Minister of Justice decides that a validly filled office is in fact vacant and installs his own nominee in it, against the procedure or against a court ruling. And each time the matter finally reaches a court, it turns out that it is the second appointment that is defective.
The legal consequences are serious and operate on several levels. First, acts performed by persons without authority do not produce the intended legal effects — this applies both to disciplinary judgments handed down by improperly composed benches and to the personnel and procedural decisions taken with the participation of someone who is not the National Prosecutor. Second, deliberate action against an explicit prohibition flowing from a Constitutional Tribunal interim measure, and an attempt to take over an office that is already filled, raise the question of criminal liability under Article 231 of the Polish Criminal Code and, as regards members of the Council of Ministers, of constitutional liability as well. Third and finally, the bill for this chaos will be paid by taxpayers: every set-aside ruling, every protracted proceeding and every unlawful removal from office is a potential claim for damages against the State Treasury.
Unfortunately, successive rulings have so far not changed the ministry’s practice — at most they undo its effects, and only in the particular, individual case at hand. Nor does the ministry itself appear to intend to abandon that practice: press reports even suggested that a forcible entry into the Constitutional Tribunal was planned for September 11, in order to install there persons who have not taken the oath before the President of the Republic — a legally required element of taking office as a judge of the Tribunal. That scenario has not materialized so far, but in the light of recent declarations by both the Minister of Justice and the Prime Minister it cannot be ruled out.
All the more reason to recall that those who today accept nominations to offices that are already filled should be aware that they are assuming a personal risk: legal, professional and — as Cudak’s example shows — reputational. The courts are in any case saying so ever more clearly, and the rulings of September 8, 2026 show that they will go on saying it.
Source of cover photo: iStock.
