For more than a year now the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights (HFHR) has been carrying out a project entitled “ACCESS TO LEGAL AID.” The culmination point of the project will take place on 7-8 June on the premises of the Polish Parliament: Sejm. (28 May 2002)

The forum will be organized under the name of “The Access to Legal Aid in Poland”. Among the forum participants will be representatives of the judicial, executive and legislative authorities in the country, who have been invited to the meeting by the HFHR. Foreign guests, including experts from the European Commission and the European Union, will also attend the forum.

The main goal of the project is to describe the most serious problems in this field in Poland. This description should help in the process of working out legal changes necessary for making the access to legal aid easier, especially to the poorest. The ACCESS TO LEGAL AID project, as part of the Project on Promoting Access to Justice in Central and Eastern Europe, is a collaborative effort of four organizations: INTERRIGHTS, the International Centre for Legal Protection of Human Rights, the Public Interest Law Initiative (PILI), the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee and the Polish Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights.