The text examines standards of freedom of speech stipulated by the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. The focus is on political expression, which deserves the greatest scope of protection according to Western norms determined by the jurisprudence of the mentioned court and the Supreme Court of the United States. In this connection, the latter has significantly influenced the case-law of the former. The text under discussion analyses the problem from the perspective of the case of Ziembiński versus Poland (2), 2016.

In Poland, women in need of termination of pregnancy are exposed, through the practice of application of law, to systemic abuse by public authorities and sometimes institutional abuse by healthcare providers. This results in the search for institutions outside of Poland to protect their reproductive rights. Therefore, it seems reasonable to draw attention to the multifaceted nature of the rationale that the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has indicated in its judgments on the legal and factual state of legal abortion in Poland. This paper is an attempt to synthesize the manifestations, indicated by the ECtHR, of Poland’s violations of the provisions of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms in matters relating to the termination of pregnancy. An analysis of the content of the judgments of the ECtHR and other source texts is used in this paper as the primary research method.