Although the Tribunal is not a Tribunal, and its judges are not really judges – the rationale of the Tribunal’s judgment (reference number K 1/20) is worth reading, especially if you are a lawyer with the ambition of bringing value above the pragmatic tasks set for lawyers.
Of course, the first less obvious lesson is that a lawyer can justify anything as long as he does not have to engage in real polemics with views with which he disagrees. So, in other words, thanks to such judgments we know what a real Constitutional Tribunal is in a democratic state – it is to resolve or at least define real problems that divide society. A tribunal in which in principle one view (or rather one party to the dispute) is represented may only dispute with itself to a limited extent. However, its jurisprudence must deepen the social conflict, not alleviate it. In other words, such a Tribunal makes no sense.
In this sense, writing the justification of the judgment for 36 pages (the remaining 115 pages are dissenting opinions of those who had their conscience awakened after they joined PiS) does not make much sense, because such justification consists only in selecting arguments for the adopted thesis and issued already judgment. With such obscurantism, even the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights is presented with an argument in favor of recognizing a conceived fetus as human. This justification is therefore unnecessary as it would suffice to write: the Tribunal thinks so. The arguments used discredit rather than justify this “view”.
The justification, however, has a historical value: it documents the state of mind of the social group that took power in Poland after 2015. At the same time, this justification in a chaotic and not very logical way refers to the past and quotes the discussion from the 1996 constitutional commission, statements by Marek Borowski, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Alina Grześkowiak, but also Piotr Ikonowicz. The content of these rather random quotes does not allow us to avoid reflecting on how miserable our political world and the world of public thought have gone back since then. What the author of the justification clearly does not understand, because if he did, he would not refer to the past.
