The article analyses the legitimacy of citizens telecommunications data retention usage in the fight against terrorism. Data retention, that is the preventive storage of information on the source, data, hour and duration of a connection, type of the connection, communication tool and location of a recipient, is a powerful source of knowledge about citizens and their use should be soundly justified. However, both the European Union and Polish practices show that behind this interference in privacy there is neither a guarantee that the data stored would be used exclusively to fight terrorism and severe crimes, nor a sufficient access control mechanism. The efficiency of data use in the fight against organized crimes, including terrorism, is also dubious.
  In her work the author analyses Polish studies concerning information disclosure issues, Internet publications of the European Union and American reports on retention programmes, as well as Polish and foreign positions of non-governmental organizations engaged in the civil rights protection in this respect.

The article concerns the analysis of procedures connected with election petitions in Poland on the basis of the constituencies under the jurisdiction of the District Court in Toruń. It should be mentioned, however, that research is currently being conducted in other courts, which even at the preliminary stage appears to corroborate the results of the analysis presented in the article. The research focuses on the guarantees of the efficiency of the electoral petition in Poland. The election petition is the most important instrument which is available to verify the validity of elections. The Constitution does not regulate this matter, entrusting the legislator with this task. The possibility of submitting an election petition implements the principle of the external judicial review of the progress of an election or referendum, which can be initiated upon the request of a legal entity entitled to submit the petition. Considering the role of the petition proceedings as well as the values which remain protected within the procedure of settlement, the legislator should demonstrate the utmost care to increase their efficiency. However, the regulations concerning election petitions are scattered around the whole Electoral Code. Furthermore, for an election petition to be justified, there must be a cause-effect link between the law violation and the results of an election, with the burden of proof placed on the petitioner. The overall result is that in judicial practice only in few cases have grievances in election petitions been considered justified.

In the conditions of modern state social and cultural policy of Belarus, the problem of studying and using the cultural heritage is very actual: the creation of projects and programmes of social and cultural development demands the research of history, heritage and traditions. A noticeable trace in the Belarusian cultural heritage was leftby the Old Believers who moved on Belarusian lands in the second half of the 17th century. The history of the Old Believers on the Belarusian lands before the beginning of the 20th century is widely represented in the monographs of A.A. Gorbatsky: The Old Believers in Belarus at the End of the 17th - the Beginning of the 20th Centuries, Brest 1999; The Old Belief in the Belorussian Lands, Brest 2004. There is no monographic literature concerning the history of the Old Belief in Belarus in the 20th century. In the Belarusian scientific magazines there are some articles by T. Dobzhinskaya and T. Hursan devoted to the analysis of the life and activity of Old Believers in Belarus in the 20th century. The articles by T. Dobzhinskaya deal with the history of the Old Belief in Vitebsk region in the first half of the 20th century. T. Hursan in her articles analyzes ethnographic features of Old Believers in Mogilev region. The aim of this article is to show some peculiarities of the development of the state policy in relation to Old Believers in Belarus in the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries.

The implementation of the constitutional right of citizens to obtain information about the activities of state authorities, in particular, in the sphere of state security, causes many problems resulting from the application of the Act on the Protection of Classified Information. The measures adopted in the Act, promoting the rights of the community at the expense of the rights of individuals, pose a risk of its instrumental use for political purposes. The reduction of the above-mentioned risk may be supported by a minor correction of the regulations in force, as postulated by the author of the article, which includes an increase in external supervision over the marking of materials containing information intended for protection, which does not undermine the grounds for restricting the transparency of public activities, permitted by the international law and by the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, and required from the perspective of public safety. The conclusion is that it is difficult to be optimistic about this area due to the observed reluctance of the ruling elites to voluntarily abandon the tools that give them an advantage in public communication.

Human rights in the constitutions of selected European countries

Nowadays human rights are an essential part of constitutional regulations in the European countries. The very first universal regulation based on the rights of every citizen, was The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen set in 1789. Analysed constitutions of France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Latvia, Bohemia, Slovakia and Poland point to the developments of rights of individuals through expanding these rights from the rights of the citizens to the rights of every person on the territory of a particular country. Obviously, the rights concerning exclusively the citizens of a particular country, like for example the right to vote, have still been maintained. A modern catalogue of rights and freedoms of individuals is abundant and expanded by, for example, the right to the constitutional complaint or the right to a clear environment. Nowadays the human rights standards are widely recognised though not always respected. This results from the legal and political practise, in which the scope of the rights of individuals is still being narrowed. One of the reasons are ideological and political changes in particular countries, which are being enforced with the development of civilisation and technology.

The U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence has often delineated the borders of American racial politics. In some way, the Supreme Court decisions reflected economic, political, cultural, and ideological values of the contemporary society. The decision of Plessey v. Ferguson was a symbolic establishment of the separate but equal doctrine. It was also significant from the perspective of American federalism. In the 1950s, several rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court influenced American racial politics and paved the way for changes in the context of the development of civil rights. The decision of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka was victory of the civil rights movement. It was perceived as a model for the subsequent cases. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the right of interposition. It was assumed that the power to declare federal laws unconstitutional applied not to the state but only to federal judiciary.