Poland’s government has said it will proceed with registering foreign same-sex marriages despite a Constitutional Tribunal ruling against its regulation allowing for the transcription of same-sex marriages.
The tribunal issued a ruling on July 28, 2026 that a digital ministry regulation allowing the registration of same-sex marriages concluded abroad is unconstitutional because it went beyond technical administrative changes and conflicted with the constitution’s definition of marriage.
Polish law does not allow same-sex couples to marry or enter into civil unions, and a bill that would have granted such limited rights to unmarried couples was vetoed by President Karol Nawrocki on July 17, 2026. The bill, on the status of a closest person, was the first measure of its kind to clear both chambers of parliament.
The transcription was introduced by the digital affairs ministry after judgments by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and Poland’s top administrative court, the Supreme Administrative Court (NSA).
Transcription is the administrative process of entering information from a foreign civil-status document into the Polish register. It does not introduce same-sex marriage under Polish law but allows marriages legally concluded abroad to be recorded in Polish documents.
It changes official marriage-document templates by replacing separate fields for a woman’s and a man’s details with fields that can accommodate either sex.
The change applies to full and abridged marriage certificates and other documents issued from the civil-status register.
After the ECJ ruled on November 25, 2025 in case C-713/23 that Poland must recognise such marriages, the digital affairs ministry changed civil status forms. Instead of separate fields for “man” and “woman”, the new templates use “man/woman”, allowing registry offices to record both opposite-sex and same-sex marriages.
The regulation was signed by Gawkowski and interior minister Marcin Kierwiński, published in the Dziennik Ustaw (Journal of Laws) on May 22, 2026 and is due to take effect on August 23, 2026.
Until this year, same-sex couples who married abroad were unable to register their marriage certificates in Poland. That changed after the NSA ruled on March 20, 2026 that the Warsaw registry office was obliged to transcribe the certificate of a couple who had married in Germany.
The case opposing the regulation was brought by MPs from the Conservative Law and Justice (PiS) party, which opposes both same-sex marriage and the legalisation of same-sex civil partnerships as well as the centre-left government led by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.
The MPs were represented before the tribunal by Marcin Warchoł, who argued that the digital affairs minister had encroached on matters reserved for primary legislation.
In its ruling the tribunal stated that a foreign marriage certificate could be transcribed into the Polish civil register only when it concerned a marriage between a woman and a man, as defined by the Polish constitution.
The court stated that regulations can only implement existing laws and cannot change matters reserved for the constitution or parliament and that registering a foreign marriage certificate cannot produce legal effects that conflict with the basic principles of Polish law. It added that changing the constitutional definition of marriage would require amendments to the constitution and related laws.
Deputy Prime Minister Krzysztof Gawkowski, who is also digital affairs minister, rejected the ruling at a news conference in Poland’s parliament by challenging the legitimacy of the tribunal.
“The illegal Constitutional Tribunal is once again attempting to obstruct a state that is enforcing the law in force and the rulings of European courts,” Gawkowski said.
“The illegal tribunal of Mr Święczkowski [president of the tribunal – ed.] wants to deprive hundreds, and perhaps thousands in the future, of the right to happiness,” Gawkowski said, adding that work on implementing the regulation would continue, with the necessary registration procedures and documents expected to be ready in August.
“Work on the regulation supporting transcription will continue, and we will not stop,” he said.
Gawkowski said Polish authorities had already transcribed 184 foreign marriage certificates involving 368 people.
“These are people who were supposed to be treated with dignity, and the Polish state will treat them with dignity,” he said.
Government spokesman Adam Szłapka said the court’s verdict did not change the legal situation.
He argued that the court’s current composition was legally defective and said its decision could not be regarded as a valid ruling on a regulation already in force.
PiS took the opposite view. Former education minister Przemysław Czarnek said the ruling confirmed what his party had long argued and that the constitution could not be circumvented or the law changed by the back door.
The ruling represents another chapter in the longstanding dispute over the Constitutional Tribunal’s status. In March 2024 the Sejm, the lower house of parliament, adopted a resolution stating that public bodies could breach the principle of legality by giving effect to tribunal decisions issued in violation of the law.
Since that resolution, the government has declined to publish the court’s decisions, preventing them from formally entering into force.
In 2015, former PiS-aligned President Andrzej Duda refused to swear in five judges elected by the Sejm. Shortly afterwards, PiS won parliamentary elections and nominated five replacements for those judges, who were sworn in by Duda.
Three of these judges and their successors have been deemed illegitimate in a succession of judgments by European courts. Due to their continued presence on the court, the current government, which replaced PiS in 2023, rejects that body’s legitimacy and refuses to recognise its rulings.
The Constitutional Tribunal has been a thorn in the side of both the ECJ and the European Commission after it ruled on October 7, 2021 that the Polish constitution took precedence over EU law, a ruling which Brussels regards as a challenge to the union and its institutions.
The German constitutional court has issued similar rulings to Brussels’ displeasure, notably its judgment of May 5, 2020 on European Central Bank bond-buying, but for a new member state’s judiciary to rule in such a way was seen as dangerous and insolent, coming from a country in receipt of EU funds.
For a long time, the government supporting majority in parliament refused to appoint new judges to the Constitutional Tribunal as the terms of the previous judges expired, with some vacancies remaining unfilled for over a year.
Recently, the Tusk government has resumed electing new judges, with the Sejm choosing six on March 13, 2026. Nawrocki, an ally of PiS, administered the oath of office to only two of them on April 1, 2026 and has withheld it from the remaining four, who were elected long after the vacancies arose.
PiS MPs asked the tribunal to rule on the legality of that election. The tribunal adjourned the case indefinitely and invited the President to state his position on the swearing-in.
The change of heart by the Tusk majority stems from the fact that having lost the 2025 presidential election there was no way of electing a new membership of the whole court by changing legislation. To take control they need to replace judges whose terms of office expire.
The Tusk government also wants to change the make-up of the Supreme Court, the body responsible for criminal, civil, labour and family but not constitutional law, and to settle the status of more than 3,000 judges appointed since 2018 on the recommendation of the reconstituted National Council of the Judiciary.
A rule of law bill that would annul those appointments and rerun the judicial competitions has been stuck in a Sejm committee since February 2026.
