Poland's president turns his plane around as police enter the top court and its chief is suspended

Poland's fight over its highest court stopped being a paperwork dispute on Friday. Police went onto the grounds of the Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw, the tribunal's president was suspended by a judge from the rival camp, and the president of the country turned his aircraft around over the Atlantic route to Senegal and came home.

At a moment like this, the President must be in Poland. I am cutting short my flight to Senegal. I am returning, Karol Nawrocki wrote on X while airborne.

The order that set the day off came from Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, one of the judges the current Sejm elected to the tribunal in March 2026. She suspended Tribunal President Bogdan Swieczkowski and his deputy Bartlomiej Sochanski for one month and assumed the leadership of the court herself, presenting herself as its longest serving member. The profiles of both men disappeared from the tribunal's website. Swieczkowski's camp answered that he remains president, that the website was taken over illegally, and that taking part in the action amounts to the crime of a coup against a constitutional body.

Police say their deployment had a narrower basis. Warsaw police said officers acted on two written requests, one from Justice Minister Waldemar Zurek, who is also prosecutor general, asking for security around the court during protests, and one from Korwin-Piotrowska warning of risks to judges and staff. Officers say they stayed on the grounds and did not enter the building. Reuters reported that police entered the premises. Outside the fence, supporters of the former governing Law and Justice party gathered in large numbers. Three people were detained after jumping the fence, and police said dangerous objects were thrown at officers.

Zurek moved against the suspended judges on a second front the same day. He told reporters he has filed requests to lift the immunity of Swieczkowski and Sochanski, five requests in total in the reporting, over allegations that they blocked lawfully elected judges from doing their work. Swieczkowski, a former deputy justice minister and national prosecutor under Law and Justice, has refused to let the judges elected by the current majority take their seats. Nawrocki, for his part, has accepted the oath of only three of the eight judges the Sejm has elected this year.

Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski went to the tribunal and called the day an attack on the court. He accused services under Prime Minister Donald Tusk of entering by force and warned that Poland is becoming a police state. Tusk answered on X that restoring the rule of law after the Law and Justice years is his government's duty, that the process is difficult and at times painful, and that it requires decisive action.

The tribunal has been effectively paralysed by this dispute for months. The government has refused to publish tribunal rulings since March 2024, and the court cannot sit in its normal form while the two camps dispute who its judges are. What changed on Friday is the method. A suspension order signed inside a divided court, police on the grounds, immunity requests against the court's own leadership, and a president abandoning a state trip in mid flight add up to an open contest over who controls a constitutional institution, settled so far by presence and procedure rather than by any ruling both sides accept. Korwin-Piotrowska has called a general assembly of the tribunal's judges for November 3.