Evolution of the structure of the Chancellery of the President of the Republic of Poland in 1989–2017. Statutes of the Chancellery of the President

In this article, the author focuses on the constitutional prerogative of the President of the Republic of Poland, which is the granting of the statute of the President’s Chancellery. The aim of the article will be to analyze the individual statutes of the auxiliary body of the president, taking into account changes that have been made to the Law Office based on the documents issued. In the first part, the article refers to the legal basis for issuing statutes by the president, but the author in the subsequent parts focuses mainly on the analysis of documents issued by individual Presidents of the Republic of Poland.

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act, which entered into force in 2011, introduced completely new regulations on the dissolution of Parliament and the duration of its mandate. It repealed the royal prerogative under which the queen, on the advice of the Prime Minister, had the power to dissolve Parliament at any time, which would ultimately lead to parliamentary elections. Despite the introduction of a fixed parliamentary term, constitutional practice, in particular the precedents of 2017 and 2019, have shown that the fundamental objectives of the new act, i.e. to ensure the stability of governments and to prevent the Prime Minister’s manipulation of the election date for political gain, can be easily undermined. This article attempts to analyze and evaluate the functioning to date of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 in the UK constitutional system and to examine the possible implications of repealing the Act for the functioning of the UK Constitution.

Presidential Act of Grace as a Constitutional Problem in Poland

The subject of the study is the pardon procedure and the presidential act of pardon. The author criticizes the President’s ability to use only the procedure provided for in the Constitution, without taking into account the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure. Such facts occurred during the term of office of President Andrzej Duda and were considered controversial. The article indicates the “monarchal origin” of the prerogative – the law of pardon. The term “prerogative” is not – in the author’s opinion – adequate to the conditions of contemporary democracy. In fact, it is a personal competence exercised in Poland without the access of the government, but subject to general standards of the rule of law and legalism. The author analyzed the relevant provisions of the Constitution and the Code of Criminal Procedure and included de lege ferenda postulates.