Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said on August 28 that he had signed a nomination of a compromised judge “by mistake” after an official responsible for preparing the document for the signing did not recognise its political weight.

Tusk caused outrage on August 27 after it emerged that he had signed off on President Andrzej Duda's decision to nominate judge Krzysztof Wesolowski to lead the procedure for choosing a new head of one of the Supreme Court's chambers.

The judge in question has worked in the Supreme Court since March 2022 following a nomination by the National Council of the Judiciary (KRS), a judge-appointing body. 

The KRS remains one of the last holdouts of influence of the previous radical right-wing government of the Law and Justice (PiS) party. PiS overhauled the KRS in 2017 as part of its judiciary reforms that sought to establish political control over the courts.

The move earned PiS heavy criticism at home and abroad, with top European courts stating that KRS lacks independence and impartiality and that judgments handed out by Supreme Court judges appointed on recommendation from the overhauled KRS violate the right to a fair trial.

The Tusk government passed legislation to restore the KRS’s credibility in early August but Duda refused to sign it and sent it for review to the Constitutional Tribunal, another judiciary body overhauled by PiS that the Tusk government is yet to reform.

“It was a mistake. One of the PM’s tasks is signing hundreds of documents daily. The official who prepared this particular document did not recognise its political weight,” Tusk told a press conference.

“I have not cut a deal over the rule of law with the president or anyone,” Tusk also said.

The Tusk government took power last year promising to restore the rule of law in Poland after PiS had attempted to exert political control over the KRS, the Supreme Court and the Constitutional Tribunal. The European Commission consequently unfroze funding for Poland that had been frozen because of PiS' breaches of the rule of law. However, the government has been unable to make any significant changes to repair the rule of law because it has been blocked at every turn by Duda, whose veto it does not have enough votes to overturn.

Judges who opposed PiS’s judiciary reforms and who are now pushing Tusk to deliver on his rule of law promises said – before Tusk admitted the mistake – that the PM’s decision was “a complete surprise. An extremely negative surprise.”

“Judges took it for granted that the PM, who speaks of restoring the rule of law, would not agree to such a joint initiative with President Duda … They feel betrayed,” said Krystian Markiewicz of Iustitia, a judges’ association.

Iustitia also said that Tusk’s “mistake” will now make it easier for Wesolowski and other compromised judges to maintain influence in the Supreme Court for another three years until a new round of nominations.

Tusk dismissed these worries by saying that as soon as Duda steps down after completing his maximum two terms as president in mid-2025, legislation to roll back PiS’s reforms will be passed again and signed by the new president.

The Tusk camp hopes that its candidate – most likely the incumbent mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trzaskowski – will be the next president. 

Tusk also said that the official who did not warn him of the political consequences of signing off on the compromised judge’s nomination is “one of the best public servants I have ever worked with” and he will not dismiss him.