When in 2020 the World Health Organization announced a COVID-19 contagious disease pandemic, it was clear that governments must take actions to limit the consequences of pandemia. Poland was one of the first to introduce far-reaching measures, limiting freedom of movement and closing an increasing number of business and activities. The Polish Constitution contains potential extraordinary measures, including the provision for declaring a “state of natural disaster”, but the Polish government has refrained from enacting it. Instead, it is based on a “state of epidemic”, which is not provided for in the Constitution as the legal ground for limiting human rights. The purpose of this study is to answer the question whether human rights restrictions introduced during the epidemic have a sufficient legal basis from the point of view of the Polish Constitution and the resulting principles.

The fight against a pandemic, which is a form of natural disaster, is always connected with limiting constitutional freedoms and human and civil rights. Due to the emergence of the coronavirus epidemic in Poland, a number of legal regulations have been adopted to combat it. The adopted regulations are restrictive and significantly limit the exercise of constitutionally guaranteed freedoms and rights. This article analyzes the limitations of rights and freedoms introduced during the pandemic in Poland, and in particular the manner of their implementation, and assesses the process from the point of view of violating the basic standards of human rights protection. The results of the analysis lead to the conclusion that despite the substantive justification of many restrictions, the manner of their introduction violates the basic standards of human rights protection and raises fundamental doubts from the point of view of the compliance of the introduced solutions with the Constitution.