Tag: Poland
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Atina Krajewska: The judgment of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal on abortion: a dark day for Poland, for Europe, and for democracy
On 22nd October 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (CT) held unconstitutional a statutory legal provision, which had previously allowed women to access abortion on the grounds of fatal foetal abnormality. The provision under review, Article 4a para 1 (2) of the Act for Family Planning and the Protection of the Foetus (1993), had decriminalised abortion…
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Jan van Zyl Smit: After Poland’s Attempted Purge of ‘Communist-era’ Judges, Do We Need New International Standards for Post-authoritarian Countries Reforming Their Judiciary? (Part II)
Editors’ note: This is Part II of a two-part contribution. You can read Part I HERE. In Part I of this blog post, I discussed the recent attempt by the Polish government to remove members of the Supreme Court by lowering the retirement age to exclude ‘Communist-era’ judges. Other countries, not only the former Communist…
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Jan van Zyl Smit: After Poland’s Attempted Purge of ‘Communist-era’ Judges, Do We Need New International Standards for Post-authoritarian Countries Reforming Their Judiciary? (Part I)
Editors’ note: This is the first of a two-part contribution, the second part of which will appear on the blog tomorrow. For most of last year, the government of Poland maintained that legislation which effectively dismissed 27 Supreme Court judges (a third of the Court) by lowering the age of retirement was necessary to deal…
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Eliska Pirkova: ‘Polish Death Camps’ and the Quest for ‘the Truth’
On Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Polish Parliament approved an amendment to the National Remembrance Institute Act (NRIA), which establishes the criminal liability for a) “publicly ascribing responsibility and co-responsibility to the Polish People or State for Nazi crimes committed by the Third Reich” and b) “grossly reducing the responsibility of the actual perpetrators of these…