Poland's Government Is Trying to Seize Its Constitutional Court

Read that again slowly. A head of state leaves Dakar early, flies home, and walks straight into a standoff with police outside his country's highest court. The reason is simple and ugly. The government wants to remove the court's president and vice-president, and critics are calling it what it is: a coup inside the judiciary.

Europe likes to lecture us. Brussels hands out governance scorecards, Western capitals sermonize about judicial independence, and donors attach conditions to every loan. Yet here is a member of the European Union, a country that lectures Africa about the rule of law, watching its own constitutional guardians come under siege. The lesson does not stop at the Vistula. Democracy is not a regional product sold to the Global South. It is a universal standard, and it is breakable everywhere.

Consider what is at stake. A constitutional court exists for one reason: to stop the people with power from rewriting the rules to keep that power. When a government can remove the judges who check its laws, it no longer governs under a constitution. It governs under its own will. Every citizen, including those who voted for the ruling party, loses protection the moment that line is crossed. Power that can dismiss its referees will eventually dismiss the voters too.

Poland knows this history better than most. After the 2015 election, the ruling party fought the Constitutional Tribunal, refused to publish certain rulings, and filled the bench with loyalists. Democrats at home and abroad warned that the country was drifting toward an executive that answered to no one. Now the fight has returned in a new form, and the tactics look familiar: procedural maneuvers, public denunciations of judges, and a push to install people who will not say no. Each step is presented as reform. Each step moves power in one direction.

Ask yourself a question. Who benefits when a court loses its independence? Not ordinary Poles who need a judge to rule against the state when their property is seized or their rights are violated. Not small businesses that depend on contracts being enforced regardless of who is in office. The beneficiaries are the officials who want immunity, the politicians who want a free hand, and the networks that thrive in the dark where no court can see them. We in Africa have watched this story unfold in our own capitals for decades, always with the same ending: a public stripped of recourse, and a ruling class that calls its own impunity "sovereignty."

This is why the Senegalese detail matters so much. Senegal is not a perfect country, and no African nation should be treated as a moral lesson by outsiders. But in February 2024, when President Macky Sall attempted to postpone a presidential election, Senegal's Constitutional Council ruled against him. The court refused to let the executive stretch its mandate beyond the constitution. Public pressure, a free press, and an independent judiciary combined to force a return to the electoral calendar. Bassirou Diomaye Faye was elected in March 2024, and power changed hands peacefully. That is what a functioning constitutional court looks like. It is not a decoration. It is a shield for the citizen.

Compare that with the alternatives we have been forced to endure. In Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and Gabon, juntas dissolved or ignored constitutional limits, promised elections that kept slipping, and sold their people a story of liberation while tightening their grip. The men who seized power in those countries did not start with tanks. Many of them started by hollowing out the institutions that could have held them accountable. Courts were packed, opposition figures were jailed, and the language of the constitution was bent until it meant whatever the strongman needed it to mean. Africa's coup belt did not emerge from nowhere. It grew wherever the referees were removed from the field.

So what should happen in Warsaw, and what should Africans demand from our own governments in the same moment? The answer begins with the principle that no government should be allowed to dismiss a constitutional court's leadership outside the procedures the constitution itself lays down. Removal of judges must be transparent, rule-bound, and reviewable by independent bodies. Parliamentary majorities cannot be allowed to override constitutional limits simply because they have the numbers. Civil society, the legal profession, and independent media must be free to document every step, and international partners should back those institutions openly rather than offering silence in exchange for trade or security cooperation.

For our part, African citizens have a duty to be consistent. We cannot demand judicial independence in Lagos and Nairobi while ignoring it in Harare, Kampala, or Kigali. We cannot celebrate the Senegalese courts while staying quiet when constitutional term limits are bent in Togo, Côte d'Ivoire, or elsewhere. Our standard must be the same wherever power is tested. The best-run African states, from Botswana with its long record of peaceful transfers of power to Mauritius with its independent judiciary and competitive politics, show that strong institutions produce stability and prosperity. Rule of law is not a Western import. It is a practical tool that has already delivered results on our own continent.

Here is what citizens should demand, whether they live in Warsaw, Dakar, or Johannesburg. Demand that judicial appointments and removals follow the written constitution, not the convenience of the governing party. Demand that courts publish their rulings and that governments obey them. Demand independent oversight bodies with real enforcement power. Demand that business communities and civil society groups speak out when institutions are attacked, because a weak court eventually means weak property rights, weak contracts, and weak investment. Free markets cannot survive without an impartial referee.

A president who cuts short a trip to stand outside his country's constitutional court is making a statement. It says that some lines cannot be crossed quietly. Africans understand that message better than anyone, because we paid for every lesson in blood and exile. The question is whether the people who hold power in Poland, and in our own nations, will listen before the protesters outside the court become the only remaining defense of the law.

We have seen where this road ends. We should refuse to walk it again. Stand with the courts. Defend the referees. Make every government explain, in public, why it wants to remove the people who are supposed to check it.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA