WARSAW — Riot police were deployed at Poland's Constitutional Tribunal in Warsaw on Friday after the government moved to strip the court's president of his immunity, escalating a long fight over who controls the country's top judicial body, BBC News and Al Jazeera reported. Supporters of the opposition Law and Justice party (PiS) gathered outside the building in protest.

Source: BBC News and Al Jazeera via EuropeSays

Judges elected by the current parliamentary majority suspended Tribunal president Bogdan Święczkowski and his deputy, Bartłomiej Sochański, and judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska — the longest-serving judge on the bench — said she had taken temporary charge of the court. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek said he had asked for Święczkowski and Sochański to lose their immunity so they could face prosecution for obstructing the court's work; Al Jazeera reported that, over the past six months, Święczkowski had used his authority as head of the court to keep judges chosen by the current parliamentary majority from taking up their seats, effectively paralysing the court.

Source: BBC News via The Ghana Report

President Karol Nawrocki, who is backed by PiS, turned back while travelling to Senegal for the Summer Youth Olympic Games in Dakar and appeared outside the court shortly before 1 a.m. on Saturday. Video showed him pushing through the police cordon to get inside, and he was still inside at 4 a.m., according to The Guardian. In a statement read outside the court at 5 a.m., Nawrocki called the events 'a violation of Poland's constitutional order' and said 'a constitutional body was seized by force', and he called for security forces to leave.

Source: The Guardian via Daily Inference

Police said they entered the premises after incidents outside the court, including objects thrown at officers, and three people were detained, Al Jazeera and The Guardian reported. Hundreds of protesters, including opposition MPs, gathered in support of the suspended leaders. The Tribunal posted on social media that Święczkowski and Sochański remained its legally appointed senior judges and that 'all persons participating in these actions are committing the crime of a coup d'état'.

A decade-old fight over the court

The confrontation has deep roots. In 2015, the then PiS-led government moved quickly to fill the tribunal with its own appointees, and the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union later ruled that three of those judges had been improperly elected because they duplicated positions already validly filled by the previous parliament. Prime Minister Donald Tusk's government has relied on those rulings to refuse to recognise the court in its current form and has stopped publishing its decisions, while its attempts to undo the PiS-era changes have been blocked by vetoes from Nawrocki and his predecessor, Andrzej Duda. Korwin-Piotrowska is herself one of the judges Nawrocki has refused to swear in — the BBC said five judges elected since March, while Al Jazeera said three of six nominated since his election — and the Council of Europe's Venice Commission said earlier this month that he should swear them in.

Tusk defended the intervention on social media, saying that restoring the rule of law is the government's duty and that after years of PiS lawlessness the process is painful: 'There is no other way.' Former justice minister Zbigniew Ziobro called it a criminal attack on the constitutional order, Al Jazeera reported, and PiS leader Jarosław Kaczyński condemned the suspension. But lawyer Marcin Matczak, a critic of the PiS judicial changes, said the suspension had no legal basis and warned that images of armed police would damage the cause of the rule of law for years, the BBC reported. The tribunal decides whether laws comply with Poland's constitution, so who controls it affects every future dispute over legislation — and parliamentary elections are due next year.