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In January 2012, the first hearing in the proceedings against the head of the Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA) was held in the Circuit Court in Warsaw. The suit, filed by Bogdan Wróblewski, a journalist with the Gazeta Wyborcza daily, involves an infringement of claimant’s personal interests, which allegedly consisted in the CBA’s unlawful acquisition of journalist’s telecommunications data, including his phone records, in years 2005-2007.

In January 2012 the new Hungarian media act entered into force. It is a comprehensive regulation of all types of media, namely printed press, broadcast programming and the Internet. The new legislation adopted by the Hungarian authorities has come in for criticism from some EU members states, the EC and the EP for its non-compliance with the international standards of the freedom of speech and safeguards for media independence.

The President of the Supreme Court has disclosed to the HFHR a report compiled by the team responsible for implementing the procedure for publication Court’s decisions and deletion of any sensitive data contained in such rulings. The President of the Supreme Court set up this team in May 2011.

In December 2011 the Circuit Court in Świdnica heard the appeal in the case of an allegedly defamatory statement included in a reader’s article sent to a newspaper. The Court reversed the judgement entered by the District (first-instance) Court in September 2011 and remanded the case for retrial. The District Court will be hearing the case for the third time.

The Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights is concerned by the information about actions taken by the Military Circuit Prosecution Office in Poznań who requested the disclosure of the phone data of three journalists of national media investigating the crash of the presidential plane near Smolensk, Russia.

In January 2012 the amendment to the Criminal Enforcement Code came into force. The new legislation significantly modifies the law governing post-conviction proceedings. One of the key changes relates to the complaint procedure available for prisoners. The legislator considerably limited the principle of two-instance complaint proceedings. Under the new law, a convicted person may appeal against a judicial decision issued in the enforcement proceedings ‘only where a statute so provides’.

On 16th December 2011, Polish Supreme Administrative Court declared that “amounts of money” paid for undue length of civil or criminal proceedings should be exempted from taxation. Those amounts are paid on the basis of special law of 2004 on complaint on excessive length of proceeding (skarga na przewlekłość postępowania).

Danuta Przywara, HFHR President, and Bogna Chmielewska, Foundation’s expert, received Bene Merito medals awarded by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Radosław Sikorski. The Minister bestowed the distinctions in recognition of Ms Przywara’s and Ms Chmielewska’s work for human rights in countries of the former USSR. The awards were given in particular in appreciation of the HFHR’s efforts in and commitment to human rights advocacy in Belarus.

On 19 December, the EU-Ukraine Summit was held in Kiev, marking the conclusion of negotiations on the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. On this occasion, the HFHR issued an open letter to raise the issue of the recent decrease in the level of human rights protection in the Ukraine. The open letter was drafted as part of the Europe of Human Rights programme.