Riot police have been deployed at Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal amid an escalating stand-off between Donald Tusk’s government and the court’s leadership, the BBC reports. Justice Minister Waldemar Żurek asked for the immunity of President Bogdan Święczkowski and Vice-President Bartłomiej Sochański to be lifted so they can face criminal charges.

Tusk on Friday defended the move as a duty to restore the rule of law after the PiS years, as supporters of the former power protested outside. President Karol Nawrocki, backed by PiS, entered the building according to his chief of staff after cutting short a trip to Senegal.

The court wrote on social media that the two judges the government wants to prosecute remain legally appointed and called the actions a “coup d’etat.” Tusk replied that after PiS “lawlessness” the process is hard and sometimes painful, but “there is no other way.”

The ECHR and CJEU ruled that the PiS majority improperly elected three judges; Tusk has used those rulings to stop publishing the tribunal’s decisions. Nawrocki refuses to swear in five judges elected by parliament since March; one of them, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, has been placed in temporary charge.

The Venice Commission said Nawrocki should swear the judges in. PiS-reform critic Professor Marcin Matczak nonetheless wrote that suspending the court president has no legal basis and that images of armed police will have an anti-rule-of-law backlash for years.

Image: protest in Warsaw (Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0).

Sources consulted: Police deployed during stand-off over control of top Poland court - BBC.