At noon, the full chamber of Poland’s Constitutional Court gathered to hear the dispute over powers that began in 2017 between the Polish president and the Supreme Court regarding the right to grant clemency. Eleven judges of the Constitutional Court entered the courtroom for the session.
Full composition in TK
The jurisdictional dispute centers on a non-final ruling against Mariusz Kamiński and other former leaders of the Central Bureau of Anticorruption. On May 9, the court previously planned to hear the case in full for the first time. At that moment, of the Court’s 15 judges, 10 took their seats, while one judge was absent.
For several months, questions about Julia Przyłębska’s term as President of the Tribunal have prevented a full session. In January, six Constitutional Court judges, including Vice President Mariusz Muszyński, sent a letter urging Przyłęska and President Andrzej Duda to assemble the Court and nominate a new president from candidates. On May 9, among those six signatories, Bogdan Święczkowski was present in the courtroom.
Earlier reports noted a letter from two of the six judges, Święczkowski and Zbigniew Jędrzejewski, addressed to President Przyłęska stating that their participation in the ongoing inquiry does not alter their earlier position from January 3, 2023, that after the end of her six-year term, she would no longer serve as President of the Court.
The Constitutional Tribunal was slated to hold another hearing on this matter on a Wednesday, but it was postponed to Friday due to the sudden absence of a judge, the court’s press service explained.
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Jurisdiction dispute over the right to pardon
The case traces back nearly a decade. In March 2015, the District Court for Warsaw in the first instance convicted former CBA chief Mariusz Kamiński, who currently heads the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Administration, and Maciej Wąsik, then Kamiński’s deputy in the CBA and now Deputy Minister of the Interior and Administration, to a term of three years in prison for exceeding powers and improper management during the so-called country scandal of 2007. Two other former CBA leaders received prison terms of two and a half years each.
In November 2015, before appeals were reviewed, President Andrzej Duda pardoned all four unlawfully convicted individuals. In March 2016, the Supreme Court overturned the lower verdict and, in light of the president’s clemency, legally discontinued the case. Prosecutors filed a cassation appeal with the Supreme Court against that judgment.
However, cassation proceedings at the Supreme Court were suspended on August 1, 2017. The Court justified its action by referring the matter to the Constitutional Court over a jurisdictional dispute between the Supreme Court and the president concerning the presidential pardon power.
The question of powers arose when, in June 2017, the then Marshal of the Sejm, Marek Kuchciński, referred the issue to the Constitutional Court. It concerns the president’s constitutional authority to grant clemency and whether the Supreme Court should have a binding interpretation of that power.
The dispute gained momentum following a late May 2017 ruling by seven Supreme Court judges in response to a query from the former heads of cassation from the CBA. They stated that a presidential pardon should apply only to those legally convicted, even though the former heads of the CBA had not completed a formal conviction.
After the case was sent to the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court paused its proceedings. In February and March, the Supreme Court reportedly began cassation proceedings ex officio. The delay cleared the way for a Supreme Court hearing, announced to take place on Tuesday, June 6 of the current year.
olk/PAP
Source: wPolityce