Legislative Aspects of the NRAs’ Status in the Infrastucture Sectors

Ownership and structural changes in the infrastructural sectors of the Polish economy in the last three decades, while maintaining the public interest (art. 22 of the Constitution) and the implementation of the “social” market economy principle (art. 20) of the state’s influence on these sectors, justify the need for a legal and constitutional reflection on the status of activities of regulatory bodies in these sectors. The accession to the European Union has placed said activities on the path of the Union’s integration policies, aimed at “horizontal” integration of the infra-structural sectors of the EU member states. A typical and most commonly used legal tool for implementing EU integration undertakings are sectoral directives of the European Parliament and the Council. The Polish regulatory authorities with their postulated attributes of independence, professionalism and objectivity, have found themselves in the field where two routes of the addressed impacts cross: the EU sectoral integration route and the route of implementation of national policy toward infrastructure sectors (steaming from the Polish Council of Ministers and from relevant ministries). The author, identifying the elements of such use, points out the constitutional and legal uncertainties (even: dilemmas) in regard to the relationship between the Council of Ministers (and the Prime Minister)/relevant ministries and the state sectoral regulatory bodies.

Violations of the Constitutional Guidelines of the Civil Service

The article presents the issues of post-constitutional legislative practice, in part concerning the law of the civil service. In the author’s opinion, the Polish Constitution of 1997 sets a solid basis for the functioning of the civil service corps and clearly defines the principles and goals of its functioning (which are: professional, reliable, impartial and politically neutral performance of state tasks). The review of the legislation after 1997 and the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Tribunal was presented at intervals determined by the next civil service law pragmatics. The collected examples of violations of the provisions of the Constitution (in the analyzed time and area) allowed for the formulation of conclusions on the nature and practical significance of civil service law. General assessment is that polish civil service law construction (in accordance with the Constitution) is a difficult task, still unrealized in the law Polish.

The primary burden of tackling the pandemic COVID-19 lies with the state as the entity responsible for protecting the health and life of its citizens. Hence, it can be argued that the focus of the pandemic-induced changes to the Polish legal order was on administrative law, which not only sets out the principles of the functioning of the State as the executive power but also governs the relations between the government, local government and citizens, which had to be significantly modified during the pandemic. It would be impossible to analyse and discuss all the emergency measures that appeared in Poland’s administrative law due to the threats posed by the pandemic. The subject matter of the present study is the analysis of the legal solutions adopted in the Republic of Poland in the sphere of public law in connection with the spread of the virus and particular provisions shaping relationships between the two basic structural branches of Polish public administration, viz. the government administration and the local-government administration. The following part of this study will accordingly be devoted to the analysis of the legislative solution contained in Article 11h of the COVID-19 Act, establishing a legal framework for issuing binding instructions to, among others, the various bodies of local governments, local-government legal persons and local-government organisational entities without legal personality.