# Bogdan Święczkowski

# Bogdan Święczkowski

Bogdan Święczkowski (born 22 May 1970 in Sosnowiec) is a Polish lawyer and prosecutor who has been a judge of the [Constitutional Tribunal](/organizations/constitutional-tribunal) since February 2022 and its president since 9 December 2024. That presidency is part of the dispute over the Tribunal’s composition that began in 2015, in which successive governments and European bodies have disagreed about which judges were lawfully appointed and whether the Tribunal’s rulings must be published and obeyed. On the night of 30–31 October 2026 the argument reached the Tribunal’s building in Warsaw, after a judge supported by the government said she had suspended him from duty.

He graduated from the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, finished a prosecutor’s apprenticeship, and passed the prosecutor’s examination in 1996. He also completed postgraduate study in European law. He then served in several prosecution offices and headed the organized-crime bureau of the National Public Prosecutor’s Office before, from September 2006 to November 2007, leading the Internal Security Agency under the first government of Law and Justice. During that tenure former construction minister Barbara Blida died by suicide while agency officers searched her home; a Sejm inquiry later recommended criminal charges against him, and a Łódź prosecution concluded in 2010 that there was no basis to find that he had committed an offence by pressuring prosecutors in Katowice, a decision a Katowice court upheld in 2011.

In the 2011 parliamentary election he won a seat on the Law and Justice list and did not take it up. The Supreme Court held that a prosecutor who has retired remains a prosecutor and therefore cannot sit in the Sejm. After Law and Justice returned to power he became a deputy justice minister in November 2015. On 7 March 2016 Prime Minister Beata Szydło, at the request of Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro, appointed him first deputy prosecutor general and National Public Prosecutor, the post he held until he moved to the Tribunal.

The Sejm elected him a Tribunal judge by a resolution of 8 February 2022, and he took the oath before President [Andrzej Duda](/people/andrzej-duda) on 16 February 2022. On 9 December 2024 Duda appointed him president for a six-year term, preferring him to Bartłomiej Sochański after Julia Przyłębska left the presidency at the end of her term as a judge. Duda said the office, “in times of political upheavals,” required someone with experience who was prepared to take decisions. Constitutional lawyers Piotr Uziębło and Andrzej Jackiewicz questioned both his record as national prosecutor and a selection in which irregularly appointed judges may have taken part, and the cabinet of Prime Minister [Donald Tusk](/people/donald-tusk) has treated the Tribunal as unlawfully composed and has set aside its rulings.

On 30 October 2026 Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, whom parliament had elected to the Tribunal and whom President [Karol Nawrocki](/people/karol-nawrocki) had not sworn in, said she had ordered a one-month suspension of Święczkowski and of deputy president Bartłomiej Sochański, citing blocked seats and the way cases were assigned. Police cordoned off the court; supporters cut through a fence, and officers prevented Święczkowski from going in. Jarosław Kaczyński described the step as an assault on the court, and an account identifying itself as the Tribunal’s said the website had been seized and that Święczkowski was still president. Nawrocki turned back from a visit to Senegal, entered the building after midnight, and said the government’s appointees were not judges of the court. The same evening Justice Minister and Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek announced that he had filed motions to lift the immunity of Święczkowski and Sochański.

## Early life and education

### Upbringing and legal studies

Bogdan Roman Święczkowski was born on 22 May 1970 in Sosnowiec. On 27 January 2011, testifying before a Sejm investigative committee on alleged improper pressure on the police, prosecutors and security services, he identified himself by that full name and as then aged 41.

He completed legal studies at the Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. Before the 2011 committee he said that he had defended a master's thesis in criminalistics (*kryminalistyka*) at the university in 1994, and that the thesis had received the grade "very good" (*bardzo dobra*). *Polityka* reported that he studied law alongside Zbigniew Ziobro: the two were age-mates, both born in 1970, and both finished their studies in 1994. *Newsweek* likewise wrote that the two men met as students at the Jagiellonian University.

At the same hearing Święczkowski said that he had completed European studies and that he knew foreign languages. A December 2024 profile in Wirtualna Polska, drawing on the Polish Press Agency, described the coursework as postgraduate study in European law; neither account names the institution or the year.

In 2000 he married Małgorzata Hencel-Święczkowska, who was then a judge of the District Court in Sosnowiec. Wirtualna Polska later reported that the couple have a daughter.

### Prosecutor’s training

Święczkowski told the committee that from 1994 to 1996 he served a prosecutor's apprenticeship (*aplikacja prokuratorska*) at the District Prosecutor's Office in Tychy (*Prokuratura Rejonowa w Tychach*). *Polityka* described Ziobro's apprenticeship as running in the same years at the prosecutor's office in Katowice: on that account, Ziobro had wanted to train in Kraków but failed the entrance examination there, while Święczkowski trained in Tychy. The weekly wrote that the ties between them dated from this period of study and training, even though it was unclear whether they already shared a friendship or political views.

Under the consolidated text of the Prosecution Service Act then in force, a prosecutor's apprenticeship was practical preparation for a prosecutor's duties and lasted two years. After it, the trainee had to sit an examination before a commission appointed by the Prosecutor General; only after passing could the trainee be appointed an assessor (*asesor*). The biography published by the Constitutional Tribunal states that Święczkowski passed the prosecutor's examination in 1996. He told the committee that he then worked, from 1996, at the District Prosecutor's Office in Sosnowiec, first as an assessor and later as a prosecutor.

## Prosecutorial career before 2015

### District and regional posts

Święczkowski passed the prosecutor’s examination in 1996 and afterwards worked as a prosecutor in several prosecution offices. He was appointed a prosecutor of the District Prosecutor’s Office in Sosnowiec in 1998; a later account states that he had been an assessor there from 1996. In 2001 he became a prosecutor at the Regional Prosecutor’s Office in Katowice, in its investigative division and, from 2003, in the division for organized crime, and he was delegated to the National Public Prosecutor’s Office in Warsaw in 2001 and again in 2005.

In 2003, as a Katowice prosecutor, he signed the order on which officers of the [Central Bureau of Investigation](/organizations/central-bureau-of-investigation) detained two Silesian businessmen accused of belonging to an organized group involved in fuel fraud; they spent a year in pretrial detention. After an 18-year case a third judgment became final in 2021, the two men were cleared, and in 2025 the Court of Appeal in Katowice awarded them 750,000 zł for the detention. Through a spokesman of the Constitutional Tribunal, Święczkowski said he did not regard himself as responsible, because a court rather than a prosecutor decides on detention.

### Organized-crime bureau

From 8 November 2005 to 16 January 2006 he was acting deputy director of the Bureau for Organized Crime at the National Public Prosecutor’s Office, and from 17 January 2006 its director. In January 2006 he was also appointed to the Council of Prosecutors attached to the Prosecutor General. Before a Sejm committee in January 2010 he testified that, in the kidnapping and murder of Krzysztof Olewnik, he first agreed in the spring of 2006 with the supervising prosecutor, Maciej Florkiewicz, that the Warsaw inquiry need not be moved, but later recommended its transfer to Olsztyn. He said National Prosecutor Janusz Kaczmarek signed the order, which he himself could not, and that the two later gave conflicting accounts of whose decision it had been. He added that he had meant to seek service consequences for neglect in the case, but left in October 2006 before doing so.

On 11 September 2006 Zbigniew Ziobro, then minister of justice, appointed him a prosecutor of the National Public Prosecutor’s Office, a rank distinct from the office of National Prosecutor. The next day he resigned that post and left the prosecution to head the Internal Security Agency.

### Return to the prosecution

He resigned as head of the agency on 2 November 2007, and on 3 November he was restored to his previous post as a prosecutor of the National Public Prosecutor’s Office. Ziobro assigned him to the bureau’s branch in Katowice, which he had sought because of a seriously ill daughter. National Prosecutor Marek Staszak then ordered him, after the New Year, to the Bureau of Court Proceedings in Warsaw. He reported in late January 2008 and sued the minister of justice in the Warsaw labour court, arguing that a transfer without his consent limited prosecutorial independence and claiming the cost of living in the capital. Minister Zbigniew Ćwiąkalski said the claim had not reached him and that a superior decided where service at the national office was performed. From 2008 he worked in that bureau’s cassation team, and in late 2009 he was a candidate for Prosecutor General in a competition followed by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.

The Act of 9 October 2009, in force from 31 March 2010, separated the Prosecutor General from the minister of justice and replaced the National Public Prosecutor’s Office with a Prosecutor General’s Office. Prosecutors of the former national office who were not appointed to the new office were to be moved to appellate or regional posts at their existing pay; an objection within 14 days brought retirement within a month, with the emolument valorized in line with the salary of a judge of the Supreme Court of Poland. The Prosecutor General’s Office stated in October 2011 that, under this one-off procedure, 27 such prosecutors — aged from 38 to 69, including Święczkowski and Dariusz Barski — had entered retirement in 2010, on emoluments equal to their last salary until the age of 65.

## Head of the Internal Security Agency

### Appointment and remit

On 13 September 2006 Prime Minister Jarosław Kaczyński, leading the first Law and Justice government, entrusted Bogdan Święczkowski with the duties of head of the Internal Security Agency after Witold Marczuk left the post. He was formally appointed on 19 October 2006. A resignation dated 24 October 2007 took effect on 2 November, when Kaczyński assigned the duties to Colonel Jerzy Kiciński. The minister of justice and prosecutor general was Zbigniew Ziobro.

Under the Act of 24 May 2002 the head is a central organ of government administration, subordinate to the prime minister, and the Sejm oversees that activity. The prime minister appoints and dismisses the head, in the rank of secretary of state, after opinions from the president, the College for Special Services and the Sejm’s special-services committee. Its tasks include countering threats to internal security and detecting specified crimes, among them corruption by public officials where it may threaten state security.

### Death of Barbara Blida

Barbara Blida, a [Democratic Left Alliance](/organizations/democratic-left-alliance) member of the Sejm from 1989 to 2005 and minister of spatial economy and construction from 1993 to 1996, was at her home in Siemianowice Śląskie on the morning of 25 April 2007. Tomasz Tadla, spokesman of the Katowice Regional Prosecutor’s Office, said she was to have been detained that day with 13 other people in a coal-industry investigation, and that she died of a self-inflicted gunshot during an ABW search of the house.

An order signed the previous day directed officers to bring her to the Katowice office so that a corruption allegation in case V Ds 25/06 could be put to her. It was never announced, so a later review of the file concluded she never became a suspect. The group’s leader, later charged as Grzegorz S., allowed her to use the bathroom with a female officer. She then fired a revolver she lawfully owned. Forensic findings described a standing shot to the chest; officers called an ambulance. Her husband’s account of where the officer stood differed from the officer’s. Prosecutors thought it more probable, though not certain, that Blida had taken the weapon from a safe after the officers arrived and hidden it in the bathroom. Neither she nor the room had been searched first.

On 25 February 2010 Święczkowski told the Sejm commission that he regretted his officers had not prevented the death and that, as former head, he bore moral responsibility. He said she should not be made a hero, denied any pressure in the case, and rejected the claim that the detention was meant as a media success for Law and Justice, while insisting the inquiry would otherwise have shown corruption. Chairman Ryszard Kalisz said the deputies were not persuaded and that Święczkowski’s role had gone too far.

### Inquiries and later assessments

Łódź prosecutors took over the death investigation on 28 April 2007. A Sejm commission created on 19 December 2007 adopted its report on 26 July 2011 (print no. 4553, presented on 30 August). After amendments from [Civic Platform](/organizations/civic-platform), the Democratic Left Alliance and the [Polish People's Party](/organizations/polish-people-s-party), the majority called for Kaczyński and Ziobro to face the State Tribunal for using criminal law against people the government sought to exclude, “in particular” Blida, and for charges against Święczkowski and deputy head Grzegorz Ocieczek. Law and Justice dissented, calling the conclusions legally defective. The commission cannot itself open a Tribunal case, which needs 115 signatures, and it filed no crime report against either ABW official. On 25 September 2015 a motion to hold Ziobro constitutionally responsible for conduct in the report received 271 votes to 152, with two abstentions, short of the 276 required.

Grzegorz S. alone was charged, for not ordering a search of Blida or the bathroom. On 9 July 2013 the District Court in Siemianowice Śląskie convicted him and imposed six months’ imprisonment, suspended for two years. The Regional Court in Katowice quashed that judgment in 2014. A retrial ended in acquittal; the prosecution withdrew its appeal, and because the family did not appeal the acquittal became final. Cases against the other officers, and separate threads on traces, alleged pressure and the prosecutors’ later conduct, were discontinued.

On 23 July 2025 the National Prosecutor’s Office published a “white book” prepared by a team Prosecutor General [Adam Bodnar](/people/adam-bodnar) had appointed on 29 June 2024 and which he called a commitment to the Left. Its assessment — the office’s, not a court’s — was that the case had been used politically and that the draft charges rested on very doubtful evidence. It described Święczkowski as the person who led the presentation of the case to Kaczyński and who received information informally from appellate prosecutor Tomasz Janeczek. It recorded, as testimony rather than a finding, Janusz Kaczmarek’s statement that personal ties could have let Święczkowski influence Katowice prosecutors. It saw no basis to reopen proceedings: official misconduct punishable by up to three years was time-barred after five years, or fifteen if a case had been opened, so conduct from 2007 was barred by 2022 at the latest.

## Politics and the 2011 mandate dispute

### Regional council and the Sejm election

In the 2010 local elections Bogdan Święczkowski won a seat on the assembly of the Silesian Voivodeship, standing first on list no. 5 of the Law and Justice (PiS) committee in constituency no. 7 and receiving 15,955 votes, 7.17 percent of valid votes. The State Electoral Commission's card for that candidacy left the party-support field blank.

In the 2011 election to the Sejm he headed the PiS list in constituency no. 2, whose district commission sat in Wałbrzych. Recorded as a prosecutor from Sosnowiec who belonged to no political party, he received 17,109 votes—7.59 percent of valid votes in the constituency and 31.53 percent of the 54,271 votes for the list—and the official results marked a mandate as obtained.

### Courts and the retired-prosecutor bar

He did not sit. On 27 October 2011 [Grzegorz Schetyna](/people/grzegorz-schetyna), Marshal of the Sejm, ordered that the mandate of Bogdan Roman Święczkowski had expired that day. The order, published as *Monitor Polski* 2011, no. 100, item 1017, cited Article 249 § 1 of the Electoral Code and Article 103(2) of the Constitution, which bars a prosecutor from exercising a deputy's mandate. A prosecutor in retirement (*stan spoczynku*) since 1 May 2010, he did not, within 14 days of the 12 October 2011 promulgation of the results, resign that status as the Code required, arguing that retirement was not an office and that the bar was discriminatory.

On 9 November 2011 the Supreme Court, in closed session (III SW 168/11; Teresa Flemming-Kulesza presiding and reporting, with Maciej Pacuda and Małgorzata Wrębiakowska-Marzec), dismissed the appeal. It held that "prosecutor" in Article 103(2) includes a prosecutor in retirement: the service relationship continues, transformed rather than ended, until death, and a statute cannot narrow that incompatibility. The same day the Court dismissed the parallel appeal of Dariusz Barski, another retired prosecutor elected on a PiS list (III SW 169/11).

The Silesian assembly then ended the council seat. On 14 November 2011 it voted 23 to 8, with six abstentions, to declare the mandate expired. Święczkowski had written that he gave up the seat as of the moment he took the deputy's mandate—later calling this a statement of timing, not a condition—and withdrew the letter after he neither took the oath nor sat; the assembly treated the statement as effective. The Voivodeship Administrative Court in Gliwice rejected complaints in January and May 2012 on procedural grounds and, after a merits hearing that November, dismissed the case: the mandate expires when the resignation is lodged, and the resolution only confirms it. On 21 May 2013 the Supreme Administrative Court upheld that result. Judge Elżbieta Kremer said that without the resignation he could not have become a deputy, and that any withdrawal had to arrive with or before the statement. The seat stayed empty while the litigation continued.

### Solidarna Polska

On 2 December 2011 in Sosnowiec, Święczkowski publicly backed [Solidarna Polska](/organizations/sovereign-poland), the post-election grouping around Zbigniew Ziobro that had broken with PiS. He said he would support its clubs "with heart and soul," but that if a party were formed he could support it only "in spirit," because a prosecutor in retirement could not take part in party-political activity. On 24 March 2012 a founding congress in Otrębusy, near Warsaw, made the grouping a party, elected Ziobro president, and chose the registered name "Solidarna Polska Zbigniewa Ziobro," using Solidarna Polska day to day because an association already held the shorter name.

## National Public Prosecutor, 2016–2022

### Ministry of Justice and the 2016 law

On 24 November 2015 Prime Minister Beata Szydło, at the request of Minister of Justice Zbigniew Ziobro, appointed Święczkowski undersecretary of state in the Ministry of Justice; the ministry said he waived the post’s basic salary. He left it when Szydło, again on Ziobro’s motion, appointed him with effect from 7 March 2016 as first deputy of the Prosecutor General and National Public Prosecutor (*Prokurator Krajowy*). Polish Radio reported that he had helped draft the provisions rejoining the prosecution to the government.

The Act of 28 January 2016 on the Public Prosecutor’s Office (*Prawo o prokuraturze*), tabled by deputies on 24 December 2015, was passed by the Sejm on 28 January and the Senate on 30 January, signed by President Andrzej Duda on 12 February and brought into force on 4 March 2016.028-e) Article 1 § 2 makes the Prosecutor General the supreme organ of the prosecution and vests the office in the Minister of Justice, who need meet only part of an ordinary prosecutor’s qualifications. The merger reversed the 2009 separation, which the Venice Commission of the [Council of Europe](/organizations/council-of-europe) had cited as part of a European shift toward a prosecution less tied to the executive; Polish authorities called the personal union a return to earlier practice, meant to raise accountability and efficiency.028-e) The Act also replaced the Prosecutor General’s Office with the National Prosecutor’s Office and appellate offices with regional ones.028-e)

A superior’s instruction on the content of a procedural act must be written and, if requested, reasoned, and the prosecutor may ask to be excused from it. The Prime Minister appoints and dismisses the National Public Prosecutor on the Prosecutor General’s motion, after the President’s opinion and, for dismissal, with the President’s consent. In its opinion of 8–9 December 2017 the Venice Commission called the merger the central change and wrote that joining a political office to the chief prosecutor’s created “insurmountable problems,” above all through intervention in individual cases.028-e) It called the National Public Prosecutor’s appointment political, implying trust with the Prosecutor General, and recommended splitting the offices or, if the merger stayed, limiting the minister to general guidelines.028-e) The [European Commission](/organizations/european-commission)’s 2021 rule-of-law chapter restated that after 2016 the minister directly wielded those highest prosecutorial powers, including case-specific instructions and transfers, an arrangement it had already criticised in its reasoned proposal under Article 7(1) TEU.

### Direction of the prosecution service

The Act makes the National Public Prosecutor the head of the National Prosecutor’s Office and the superior of prosecutors there and in the other common units, and allows him or the Prosecutor General to second a prosecutor for up to six months in a year without consent. Transitional rules moved prosecutors of the former Prosecutor General’s Office and of appellate offices who were not kept in the new national or regional offices.028-e) The authorities told the Venice Commission that on 31 October 2017 some 931 prosecutors and 18 assessors were on secondment.028-e)

Prosecutors quoted by Onet in February 2022 used the nickname “Godzilla” for Święczkowski and described rewards for cooperation beside what they called “3D” for others: degradations, compulsory secondments and disciplinary cases. *Polityka* used the same nickname in March 2021 and presented distant secondments of Lex Super Omnia members as retaliation for the association. Drawing on that association’s 2021 material, Onet reported that in 2016 about 114 experienced prosecutors were sent to lower units, that demotions covered 124 people, including founder Krzysztof Parchimowicz, and that at least 32 prosecutors faced disciplinary or criminal proceedings. Lex Super Omnia was formed in 2017; a Venice Commission delegation met it and the association Ad Vocem in Warsaw on 25–26 October 2017.028-e)

Reported cases included Mariusz Krasoń’s move from Kraków to a district office in Wrocław about 300 kilometres from home, and the 18 January 2021 posting of Katarzyna Kwiatkowska, then president of Lex Super Omnia, from Warsaw to Golub-Dobrzyń, about 180 kilometres away, on roughly 48 hours’ notice, with several other members. The 2021 rule-of-law chapter recorded about 20 such January moves, attributed by the National Prosecutor’s Office to COVID-19 staffing needs and by associations to punishment, and said unconsented transfers of up to six months had been used against critical prosecutors. In 2022 the Regional Court in Warsaw held Kwiatkowska’s secondment discriminatory because of her association work and awarded about 18,600 zlotys, accepting that reasons were not legally required but finding no objective grounds for the distance. In March 2022 the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights described 2016–2022 as the practical removal of prosecutors’ independence, cadre change presented as reform, “penal” secondments and selective rewards, and it disputed claims that statistics since 2015 showed success.

### Departure in 2022

The National Public Prosecutor’s post ended in February 2022, when Święczkowski became a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal, not in 2024. By a resolution of 8 February 2022 the Sejm elected him, on a candidacy from deputies of Law and Justice, to the seat of Leon Kieres, whose nine-year term had ended on 23 July 2021. On 16 February 2022 he took the oath before President Duda, and from that day, as the Presidential Chancellery announced, he no longer held the office he had taken up on 7 March 2016.

## Surveillance powers and later investigations

### Operational control and Pegasus

While Święczkowski was National Public Prosecutor, the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau Act, in the text the bureau published in 2016, let a court order operational control (*kontrola operacyjna*) only on a written application by the head of the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau after written consent from the Prosecutor General, then Zbigniew Ziobro. Article 57 § 2 of the 2016 Law on the Prosecution Service separately authorized the National Public Prosecutor to inspect that material under classified-information rules. Those powers were later disputed in the Sejm inquiry into the bureau’s use of Pegasus.

*Magdalena Sroka with members of the Sejm investigative commission on Pegasus during a sitting.*

In December 2021 the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, reporting with the [Associated Press](/organizations/associated-press), found that Pegasus had infected the phone of opposition senator Krzysztof Brejza 33 times in 2019, from April to October, while he ran his party’s parliamentary campaign. [Amnesty International](/organizations/amnesty-international) said it had confirmed that infection on its own. Citizen Lab also reported infections of phones used by the lawyer [Roman Giertych](/people/roman-giertych) and by prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek; the government denied that the use was political. *[Gazeta Wyborcza](/organizations/gazeta-wyborcza)* reported that deputy bureau head Grzegorz Ocieczek signed the 2019 application concerning Brejza and that Święczkowski approved it: the bureau sought three months, the court granted one, and the forensic trace continued into October. Brejza said the court order ended on 26 May 2019 and that later monitoring may have fallen outside it.

On 21 October 2026 the commission, chaired by Magdalena Sroka, adopted a final report finding the purchase of Pegasus, its release to Polish services, and its use against opponents of the then government unlawful. It found no required IT-security accreditation, that courts had not been told of the system’s full capabilities, and that data could leave Poland, principally to the vendor; the purchase cost 33.4 million zł, with money drawn from the Justice Fund for crime victims among the objections. Six members present voted for the report. Members from Law and Justice and Confederation were absent, and dissenting opinions could be filed until 5 November 2026.

Święczkowski refused to attend, citing the Constitutional Tribunal judgment of 10 September 2024 in case U 4/24, which held that the article of the Sejm resolution defining the commission’s remit was inconsistent with article 2 of the Constitution. On 1 April 2025 Investigative Team No. 3 nonetheless questioned him as a witness in the prosecution’s own Pegasus inquiry. On 30 September 2025 Prosecutor General Waldemar Żurek asked the Tribunal for leave to charge him over the Giertych file. Prosecutors alleged that, from 8 July 2020 to 9 June 2021, he ordered prosecutor Paweł Wilkoszewski, without the written authorization a 2017 ministerial regulation required, to “control” bureau activity against Giertych from 17 July to 4 December 2019—including private, professional and political life and defence secrets—and to copy it onto 15 DVDs, which they said only the bureau’s head could do, and only with a minister’s consent, as an abuse of power and a disclosure of official information. Święczkowski called the request a “disgraceful political stunt,” said the orders were lawful and that Wilkoszewski had been authorized in writing, and later said he had never seen the recordings.

### Housing allowances and internal inquiries

From 2016 to 2018, 38 prosecutors of the National Prosecutor’s Office received more than 2.3 million zł in housing allowances of about 3,000 zł a month, a payment meant for service away from home, although they worked permanently in Warsaw. Święczkowski received 78,029 zł, with Ziobro’s consent to his own allowance and his consent to the others. A 2018 amendment later added a statutory basis that critics said had been missing. Święczkowski answered that Article 109 had already allowed the payments in 2016, and pointed to refusals to investigate in 2017 and 2019. After Krzysztof Parchimowicz’s notification in February 2024, an internal-affairs inquiry into suspected fraud and abuse of power for gain remained “in the matter,” and as of June 2026 no one had been charged.

### Immunity proceedings

On 15 October 2025 the Tribunal’s General Assembly, chaired by vice-president Bartłomiej Sochański, unanimously refused Żurek’s request of 30 September for leave to charge Święczkowski over the Giertych material. The same day in September, prosecutors asked the Supreme Court to lift Wilkoszewski’s immunity. In December 2025 the National Prosecutor’s Office said the October resolution had no legal effect, because two participants were in its view not lawfully judges and not every voter had read the evidence, and it treated a further request as still open.

On 30 October 2026 Żurek filed five further requests, four concerning Święczkowski and one concerning Sochański, running to 224 pages with 50 volumes of files. He described serious offences of more than one kind, and identified one thread as a suspected abuse of power and neglect of duty in not admitting judges to their work—by Święczkowski, and by Sochański in his absence. The filings did not lift immunity or bring charges, and an attempt the same day to suspend him belongs to the dispute over leadership of the Tribunal. No charge had been laid.

## Judge and president of the Constitutional Tribunal

### Election as a judge

On 8 February 2022 the Sejm of the ninth term elected Bogdan Święczkowski a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal. In vote no. 33, 454 deputies took part: 233 voted in favour, 219 against and two abstained, above the absolute majority of 228. The resolution, published as Monitor Polski 2022, item 203, made the election under Article 194(1) of the Constitution. He took the seat vacant since 23 July 2021, when Leon Kieres retired; reporting described Kieres as the last judge chosen by a majority other than Law and Justice (PiS). PiS deputies had filed the candidacy on 26 January, and the Justice and Human Rights Committee endorsed it the day before the vote by 15 to 14.

Święczkowski was then National Public Prosecutor and first deputy to Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro. [Civic Coalition](/organizations/civic-coalition) member Kamila Gasiuk-Pihowicz said the candidacy “fitted perfectly” the Tribunal under Julia Przyłębska and described it as a search for the shelter of judicial immunity after what she called the politicization of the prosecution. Asked why he should be regarded as independent, he answered that a judge is independent regardless of any earlier profession. He took the oath before President Andrzej Duda on 16 February 2022 and assumed office the same day, for the nine-year judicial term.

### Appointment as president

Przyłębska, president since December 2016, resigned that office in late November 2024, shortly before her term as a judge ended on 9 December. On 6 December the General Assembly, from four candidates, put forward Święczkowski and Bartłomiej Sochański; reports said Przyłębska had favoured Sochański. The 2016 statute has the president of the Republic appoint the Tribunal’s president, for six years, from names the assembly presents; the term ends sooner if the judge’s own mandate ends. On 9 December 2024, at the Presidential Palace, Duda appointed Święczkowski president. He was already a judge; the act was the presidency, not a new seat.

Duda said that “in times of political shocks and battles,” when conformity with the Constitution mattered to the Republic’s stability, the office needed someone unafraid to decide and experienced in difficult institutions. He cited Święczkowski’s service as national prosecutor from 2016 to 2022 and said he had no doubt about his qualifications. PiS and Duda held that it was the government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk that was violating the Constitution.

Critics focused on who sat in the assembly. The dispute since 2015 concerned three judges the PiS-led Sejm elected to seats the previous Sejm had already filled, and their successors—commonly called *dublerzy* (“doubles”). Former president Andrzej Zoll told *Fakt* the appointment was irregular, “because persons who are not judges took part in the General Assembly,” that Duda had again acted contrary to the Constitution, and that he would not call Święczkowski president. Andrzej Jackiewicz, of the University of Białystok, said that if unlawfully appointed judges had joined the selection, the procedure was legally flawed. Piotr Uziębło, of the University of Gdańsk, called both candidates “among the least suitable” and told TVN there were many doubts about the legality of Święczkowski’s actions as national prosecutor. Former president Marek Safjan said on TVN24 that the choice was inconsistent with the law because the doubles had taken part, and that Święczkowski should not be addressed as president of the Tribunal.

### Early tenure and institutional conflict

The next day Święczkowski said he wanted talks with the legislature and the executive to seek a compromise on how the Tribunal functioned. Justice Minister Adam Bodnar answered that he saw no chance of compromise, and pointed to Święczkowski’s years as national prosecutor alongside Ziobro.

The government in office since December 2023 does not treat the Tribunal’s present composition as legitimate. A Sejm resolution of 6 March 2024, on removing the effects of the constitutional crisis of 2015–2023, stated that a public body which gave effect to Tribunal rulings issued in breach of the law could itself breach the principle of legality. From that resolution, Tribunal judgments were not published in the Journal of Laws. *Tygodnik Powszechny* reported that the coalition withheld publication whether or not the disputed judges had sat, and deputy justice minister Arkadiusz Myrcha told *Dziennik Gazeta Prawna* that the Tribunal’s rulings had “zero significance.”

On 5 February 2025 Święczkowski announced a notice, which he said he had signed at the end of January and which ran to about 60 pages, alleging a suspected crime by the prime minister, ministers, the marshals of the Sejm and the Senate, members of the governing coalition, the head of the Government Legislation Centre, and some judges and prosecutors. He said that from 13 December 2023 they had acted to change the constitutional system and to stop the Tribunal and other constitutional organs, including the [National Council](/organizations/national-council) of the Judiciary and the Supreme Court, citing the unpublished rulings and the March 2024 resolution. “We are talking here about the crime of a coup d’état,” he said—his characterization of that conduct, not a judicial finding.

## The Tribunal crisis through 2026

### European institutions and the status of judges

On 3 September 2024 the minister of justice asked the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission for an opinion on draft amendments to the Constitution and two laws on the Constitutional Tribunal. Opinion CDL-AD(2024)035, adopted on 6–7 December 2024, did not support ending every term: 12 of the 15 sitting judges, it said, had been elected under the prescribed procedure and their mandates had not expired. The three it regarded as irregularly appointed should withdraw from pending cases and receive none new. A statutory nullity for every ruling of a panel that included them—just over 100 since 2017—and a denial of the effects of Article 190 went too far; the Commission preferred reopening proceedings to blanket invalidation.

In *Xero Flor w Polsce sp. z o.o. v. Poland* (7 May 2021) the [European Court of Human Rights](/organizations/justice-ecthr) held that a panel including a judge elected in December 2015 to a seat the Court treated as already filled was not a “tribunal established by law.” On 18 December 2025 the Grand Chamber of the [Court of Justice of the European Union](/organizations/justice-cjeu), in *Commission v Poland* (C-448/23), found that the Tribunal’s judgments of 14 July and 7 October 2021 breached effective judicial protection and the primacy of European Union law, and that the December 2015 election of three judges and the December 2016 appointment of the president meant the Tribunal was not an independent tribunal established by law. The Tribunal replied that the decision was beyond the Court’s powers and left the Constitution supreme.

In 2026 the dispute moved to Sejm-elected judges whom President Karol Nawrocki did not swear in. An interim measure published on 6 May 2026 in *Dziurda and Others v. Poland* indicated that four applicants should not be hindered from sitting. Nawrocki had sworn in only two of six judges elected in March, and Tribunal president Bogdan Święczkowski refused to admit the others after they took oaths in parliament. Prime Minister Donald Tusk and Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek called the measure immediately binding; a Tribunal spokeswoman said Strasbourg had no power over Poland’s constitutional order, and Nawrocki’s chief of staff said the Constitution prevailed while a Tribunal case was pending. In October the Venice Commission repeated that a presidential refusal should not keep elected judges from office.

### Government non-recognition, publication and budget

Tusk’s coalition has refused to recognise the post-2015 Tribunal and has left many rulings unpublished, citing the European judgments. Article 190 makes Tribunal judgments universally binding and final, requires immediate publication of those on the matters in Article 188, and provides that a judgment takes effect on publication. On 23 September 2025, with more than 40 rulings unpublished, the Tribunal, through Święczkowski, held non-publication legally unfounded and said authorities were bound once a ruling was announced in court. The government, which said publication would perpetuate the crisis, was expected not to comply.

In October 2024 President Andrzej Duda referred to the Tribunal two bills he would not sign. They would have removed three judges appointed under Law and Justice and invalidated almost 100 rulings, including the near-total abortion judgment. His chancellery cited Article 190 and warned of “systemic chaos.” Parliament cut the Tribunal’s 2025 allocation by 17 per cent from the sum requested. Duda signed the budget but sent the cuts to the Tribunal, which on 6 May 2025, in K 2/25, held them unconstitutional. Compliance was reported as unlikely.

### October 2026 leadership dispute

On 30 October 2026 the Tribunal’s website announced a one-month break in the duties of Święczkowski and deputy president Bartłomiej Sochański under Article 130 of the law on common courts, which allows a court president or the justice minister to interrupt a judge’s duties when the judge is caught committing an offence. Judge Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, whom Nawrocki had not sworn in, said she had made the order, citing the exclusion of newly elected judges and irregularities in assigning cases, and that she was assuming the president’s duties as the longest-serving judge—counting a career begun in 1995, not service on the Tribunal.

Riot police surrounded the building in Warsaw. Supporters of the sitting leadership, including Jarosław Kaczyński, gathered outside; police detained three people after the fence was breached and objects were thrown, and Święczkowski was refused entry. Seven people elected as judges in 2026 were escorted in through a gate from the prime minister’s chancellery.

On 31 October the website still carried her order, while the Tribunal’s account on X, still used by the previous leadership, called the move a coup d’état, said Święczkowski remained president, and denied that she was a judge. Nawrocki broke off a flight to Senegal, entered overnight, and said a constitutional body had been seized by force. Tusk called it a restoration of the rule of law. Marcin Matczak, a critic of the earlier majority, wrote that the suspension had no statutory basis because the justice minister does not supervise the Tribunal.

The same day Żurek, as prosecutor general, filed motions to lift the immunity of Święczkowski and Sochański for alleged obstruction of the Tribunal, including keeping elected judges from adjudicating. As of 31 October neither claim to the presidency had been settled, and the website and the social-media account remained under competing control. That evening Korwin-Piotrowska posted rules on the Tribunal's website saying that Święczkowski and Sochański were not authorised to enter the building, which she said was needed for the safety of judges, staff and others there; on the morning of 1 November police at the entrance did not let Święczkowski in, and he said "Jestem prezesem Trybunału Konstytucyjnego. Nikt mnie nie zwolnił z tego stanowiska" (I am president of the Constitutional Tribunal. No one has dismissed me from this post) and "Codziennie będę tutaj przychodził" (I will come here every day).

## Writings, teaching and associations

### Books and articles

*Łańcuch poszlak. Wielka gra mafii i rosyjskich służb specjalnych* is an extended interview with Święczkowski by Roman Mańka and Łukasz Ziaja, from Bollinari Publishing House in Warsaw (ISBN 978-83-63865-04-7). A bookseller dates that edition to 2012; Lubimy Czytać gives 1 January 2013 and 240 pages. A later publisher’s page also calls him a co-author.

In 2014 Zysk i S-ka of Poznań published *Afery czasów Donalda Tuska*, by Święczkowski and Ziaja (ISBN 978-83-7785-428-0, 240 pages), and dated the release 23 June 2014. The house presented it as a discussion of controversies under governments associated with Donald Tusk, including economic and corruption affairs and the Smolensk air crash. That description is the publisher’s, not a court or parliamentary finding.

### Teaching and professional bodies

A 2019 CYBERSEC biography and a January 2022 *Newsweek* report call him a lecturer at the Higher School of Social and Media Culture in Toruń. *Newsweek* described the school as run by Tadeusz Rydzyk. A Polish Press Agency account described the school as conducted by the Redemptorists and called Rydzyk its founder and first rector. The same account reported that on 16 October 2021 the education minister announced its renaming as the Academy of Social and Media Culture. The 2019 biography also called him a founder and active member of the Independent Association of Prosecutors “Ad Vocem.”

A Polish Press Agency report of 21 March 2008 said prosecutors removed from posts after the change of government, including the former head of the Internal Security Agency, were organizing the association. At a meeting in Jaworzno, which Święczkowski attended, a statute was adopted, and 18 people applied to the regional court in Katowice; the stated aims included representing prosecutors and seeking transparency in the justice system. On 18 November 2016, as national public prosecutor, he chaired a joint sitting of the programme council and editorial board of *Prokuratura i Prawo*.

He was also linked to the Institute of Economic and Financial Expertise in Łódź, a budgetary unit of the Ministry of Justice created by order of 11 July 2018 and operating from 1 January 2019 to supply research and expert opinions to courts and prosecutors. At the opening on 10 May 2019 he called the institute one of his priorities, and an order of 17 December 2018 had made him acting chairman of the scientific council until a full council was chosen. A Supreme Audit Office report of 10 February 2023 found the institute properly established and able to issue opinions, but only to a small extent meeting the aims cited for creating it: shorter proceedings, budget savings and wider access to economic experts. From 2019 through early 2022 it completed 34 opinions, at an estimated cost of at least 6.59 million zlotys, more than six times statutory expert fees, without charging the bodies that commissioned them. In April 2025 a new scientific council was inaugurated under [Marek Belka](/people/marek-belka).

## Dated facts

_No published facts on this page yet._

## Methodology

https://factrail.ai/methodology

Canonical: https://factrail.ai/people/bogdan-swieczkowski