The Urgent Procedure in Theory and Practice of the Legislative Process under the Rules of the Constitution of 2nd April 1997

Legislative procedure for urgent bills constitutes a crucial prescriptive instrument that is useful to a government in parliamentary system to influence the course of legislative process. In Poland the urgent procedure was introduced by virtue of provisions of the Small Constitution 1992, as a factor that serves to prevent the lengthiness of parliamentary procedures and obstructive actions of parliamentary opposition towards government legislation program. On the basis of decisions taken by the Constitution adopted on 2nd April 1997 and as in the previous legal situation, The Council of Ministers has the exclusive right to initiate legislative proceeding as a matter of urgency. In accordance with the 123rd article, para 1 of the Constitution, urgency clause cannot be applied against tax bills, bills governing elections, draft laws regulating systems and competence of public authorities and drafts of law codes. What is more, on the basis of separate articles, budget bills are excluded from using the urgency process. The basic drawback of the urgency process in Polish political solutions is the lack of constitutional deadlines that would indicate the pace of Sejm activities concerning the urgency clause. In such a situation, the actual pace of investigation of urgent bills in the Sejm depends on the lower house’s will and its bodies. As a result, in practice of Polish parliamentary law, the urgency process is rarely applied by the Council of Ministers, particulary when the government has stable support of Sejm’s majority at its disposal. In such a case, the government may stimulate the pace of parliamentary activities concerning its bills with the use of political pressures nad with no need of using the urgency process.

Functioning of the parliamentary opposition during the period of the Constitution of 1921 and 1997 – selected issues

This article is a jubilee text, intended to celebrate the centenary of the adoption and entry into force of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland of 1921. The author discusses the issues of the functioning of the parliamentary opposition in two historical periods of the 2nd and 3rd Republic of Poland, analyzing legal regulations and political mechanisms. Due to the limited volume framework of this study, this analysis has been limited to some issues only. Their selection was primarily determined by the similarities in the sphere of normative and political phenomena that can be noticed in both epochs. Hence, the article includes topics related to: the legal basis and the normative concept of the functioning of the parliamentary opposition, the impact of the parliamentary opposition on the appointment of positions in the internal organizational apparatus of the Sejm, relations between the parliamentary opposition and the Marshal of the Sejm, the levels of rivalry and cooperation between the parliamentary opposition and the ruling camp. The author’s argument leads to a bitter reflection that the existing parliamentary system has still not freed itself from the ballast of the past and is far from a system adhering to the developed standards of protection of the rights of the opposition that exist in modern countries.