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Following the arrest of Mariusz Dzierżawski, a board member of the Pro Foundation – Right to Life, the HFHR sent a letter to the President of the District Court in Słubice, questioning the legal basis for and legitimacy of Mr Dzierżawski’s arrest.

Polish law does not provide any possibility for same-sex couples to enter into a civil partnership. Neither does it guarantee equal access to social benefits and tax credits related to the protection of family life. For this reason, two Polish women who for the last 8 years have been in a stable same-sex relationship, complained against Poland to the ECtHR.

According to the information provided by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Polish Government presented to the European Court of Human Rights its position in the case al-Nashiri vs. Poland. The Government of the Republic of Poland – pursuant to Rule 33(1) of the Rules of Court – filed a motion to limit public access to all case files on the grounds that their public disclosure could harm the interest of the pending pre-trial proceedings in Poland. The decision as to the method and scope of making the positions of the parties known to the general public will now be taken by the Court.

This is the key point of the judgment pronounced by the Supreme Administrative Court in a landmark case concerning a denial of access to public information on the use of GPS devices in police surveillance. The SAC accepted all the submissions raised by the HFHR in the cassation complaint and referred the case to the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw for reconsideration.

The HFHR sent a letter to the Ministers of Justice and Finance and the Prosecutor General, in which it raised the issue of taxes being imposed on the sums awarded as damages under the Excessively Lengthy Proceedings Complaint Act.

The HFHR has issued yet another appeal to the Ministry of Interior urging the same to consider adding to the draft Foreigners Act a provision that would enable parents legally living in Poland to legalise the stay of their children. The direct reason for this new intervention is the case of a three-year old Vietnamese girl who could not have had her stay legalised because she was not born in Poland, despite the fact that her parents lived in Poland legally.

Works on the amendment to the Prosecution Service Act are underway. The changes proposed in the draft amendment include the dissolution of the separate military prosecution service and the establishment of a Government’s power to approve annual “fundamental considerations of criminal policy”. According to the HFHR, works on the bill should be abandoned.

The HFHR called the Minister of National Defence for explanations regarding the Poland’s military plans to purchase unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs, also known as “drones”) to be used by an independent combat unit. In May this year, Gazeta Wyborcza reported that the MND plans to acquire 41 sets of unmanned aircrafts and two sets of armed drones with similar combat capabilities to those of US Predator UCAVs used in military operations performed in locations such as Pakistan.

The National Council of Judiciary responded to another letter of the HFHR concerning the issue of judges copying passages from justifications written in other cases. The NCJ upheld its previous position on the matter. In addition, it condemned the practice of repeating lexical, stylistic and punctuation errors in the copied passages of statements of reasons.