HFHR’s publication entitled “Report on Monitoring of Access to Legal Aid Paid for by the State” was delivered to the participants of an international forum on legal aid in Poland. The event took place in the Houses of Parliament in Warsaw. (2 July 2002)
Foreign and home visitors, mainly lawyers, attended the Legal Aid Forum, organized by the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights. Among the former were Ed Rekosh (Executive Director, Public Interest Law Initiative, Columbia Law School, New York-Budapest), Boris Petranov (Interights, London), Magda Krzyzanowska-Mierzewska (lawyer at the Registry of the European Court of Human Rights, Strasbourg), Andrew Drzemczewski (Director of the Monitoring Department of the Committee of Ministers, the Council of Europe), Director Thomas Ljungquist (European Commission, Justice and Home Department, Judicial Cooperation in Criminal Matters), Peter van den Biggelaar (Executive Director, Legal Aid Board – Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands), Moshe Hacohen (District Public Defender of Jerusalem; Ministry of Justice, Office of the Public Defender – Israel), Rangita de Silva-de Alwis (Director of International Programs, The Spangenberg Group – Massachusetts, USA), and Linas Sesickas (expert of the Constitutional and Legislative Policy Institute ‘’COLPI” on reform of the access to legal aid in Lithuania). Among the home visitors were: Sylweriusz Królak (Deputy Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice), Jerzy Naumann (Disciplinary Prosecutor, National Bar Council), Andrzej Kalwas (President of the National Legal Advisers Council).
The Forum lasted two days. The HFHR President Marek Nowicki, Ed Rekosh and Sylweriusz Królak delivered the opening statements. The first part of the Forum was devoted to the subject of international obligations and standards in the context of access to legal aid. In this part of the conference, Boris Petranov took the role of the moderator, while Magda Krzyzanowska-Mierzewska, Andrew Drzemczewski and Thomas Ljungquist read their papers on the subject. Access to legal aid in Poland became the topic of the second part of the conference, with HFHR Board member Professor Zbigniew Holda as moderator and Lukasz Bojarski (HFHR lawyer), Jerzy Naumann, and Andrzej Kalwas as paper readers. It is worth emphasizing that Lukasz Bojarski presented HFHR’s research report on the subject.
The second day of the Forum was dedicated to the subject of different legal aid delivery systems as well as to the possibilities of reforming the legal system in Poland. Ed Rekosh as moderator conducted the discussion on the former topic, while HFHR Board member Professor Andrzej Rzeplinski took the role of the moderator during the debate devoted to the latter subject.
Before the discussions started, the forum participants were provided with HFHR’s publication “Report on Monitoring of Access to Legal Aid Paid for by the State”. The publication concerns the problem of ex officio cases, that is to say legal services financed by the Polish Government. Those services are rendered to people who are not capable of hiring a paid lawyer. The authors of the book want to provoke a public debate that could result in amending the law concerning the access to legal aid in Poland, as well as in changing practices in this scope. Consequently, the changes in question should make the access to legal aid easier to the most of the Polish people, that is to say also to the poor.
“Report on Monitoring of Access to Legal Aid Paid for by the State” will be followed by other HFHR’s publications devoted to this subject. They will all make up a thorough report on the topic.
