Victimless crimes in the light of the Polish Constitution and the jurisprudence of Constitutional Court

The term “victimless crimes” is one of the leading concepts of American criminology, also used by libertarian circles. It assumes that acts that do not cause harm to the other person (or are made with his consent) should be legal. This theory has also found a resonance in American constitutionalism, whereas in Polish science of constitutional law this concept is virtually unknown. The case law of the Constitutional Tribunal is also more conservative and paternalistic than libertarian. The Tribunal did not consider unconstitutional provisions to drive a car with fastened seatbelts. Possession of marijuana for own use also, in the Court’s opinion, may also be prohibited by Polish law and the justification used typical conservative arguments. The Polish Constitution also protects public morality, which is in direct contradiction to libertarianism. The author of the concept, Edwin Schur, also considered abortion as “victimless crime”. The Constitutional Tribunal has an extremely different position, recognizing the need to protect unborn life. The axiology of the Polish Constitution is closer to the same spirit of Christian democracy than to extreme liberalism.

The paper is based on the observation of the process of reviving the forgotten culture of household economy, horticulture and livestock farming in disadvantaged rural areas and, through this, to develop a new service model for rural communities to strengthen the role of grassroots initiatives and enhancing the mechanisms of the co-operative model of local economy and democracy. Our research has shown that bottom-up models have several barriers to local governments in rural areas. The change in the political and governmental model of the last ten years has resulted in the restraint of local government autonomy and the vacancy of the role of local governments as public service providers. In this system, we can observe the strengthening of administrative dependence, the devaluation of the local elected political leadership (mayors) and the emergence of new rules of local power. In small settlements with less than 2,000 inhabitants, central state and political dependence intensified. Attempts to strengthen local communities have proved to be a major challenge in a highly centralised model of government. The present study gathers the factors that hinder the success of co-creative approaches in the local context and shows how the public service innovations organised by local governments are determined by the political and economic culture prevailing at the national level.