"Only publication of a Tribunal ruling in the official journal gives it generally binding force in the formal sense," Judge Stanisław Bogucki said on Monday, explaining the court’s reasoning.
He said the requirement was not just a technical step but a condition set out in the constitution.
The decision was made by a seven-judge panel in a case involving one of the court's own judges, Anna Dalkowska.
It concerns so-called impartiality tests, introduced in 2022 after a government overhaul of how Poland’s judges are chosen led to doubts, including in European courts, about whether some of them are independent.
The procedure allows a party to ask for a judge to be removed from a case over how they were appointed.
Dalkowska, a former deputy justice minister under the previous Law and Justice (PiS) government, was barred from hearing some cases under these provisions.
She challenged the impartiality tests before the Constitutional Tribunal, which ruled in February that they were unconstitutional as applied to administrative judges.
It said they allowed a judge's independence to be questioned solely on the basis of how they had been appointed.
That ruling has not been published by the government in the Dziennik Ustaw journal of laws.
Constitutional Tribunal judgments have gone unpublished since March 2024, when the Sejm, Poland's lower house of parliament, decided that acting on rulings issued unlawfully could itself be illegal.
Also, a government resolution in December 2024 said that publishing them could deepen the rule-of-law crisis.
Prime Minister Donald Tusk's Cabinet argues that the Tribunal includes judges who were unlawfully appointed under the previous PiS government.
PiS, meanwhile, accuses the current administration of undermining the constitution.
The Tribunal's website lists 85 unpublished rulings dating from April 2024 onwards.
Following the February judgment, Dalkowska asked the administrative court to reopen one of the cases in which she had been removed.
The panel declined to address her request.
It said the deadline for seeking a reopening runs from the date a Tribunal ruling takes effect, and that this had not happened because the decision had not been published.
Judge Bogucki said administrative courts can continue to apply impartiality tests, and they are doing so, state news agency PAP reported.
(ał/gs)
Source: PAP