Abstract
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Poland policy developments in the sector
Within the recent years, a series of important changes aimed at strengthening the anti-corruption legislation has been introduced into the Polish legal system. They are, among others: the law on countering the introduction to the financial circulation of the assets coming from illegal or undisclosed sources, new public procurement law, the law on the access to the public information, new electoral law and the law on political parties, law on responsibility of corporate entities as well as several important amendments and new anti-corruption provisions introduced to the penal code. Moreover, Poland has ratified the most important international agreements concerning combating corruption: Criminal Law Convention on Corruption, Civil Law Convention on Corruption, OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions.
A series of legal changes has also been introduced in order to enable international co-operation and legal assistance in combating corruption.
Despite the introduction of numerous legal regulations, the problem of corruption still persists and it concerns the majority of areas of public life.
So far, the MIA, the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance, the Public Procurement Office, the Ministry of Health, the Police Headquarters, the Border Guard Headquarters has realised the tasks within the framework of the Anti-corruption Strategy, which caused adaptation of many new – and supplementation of the existing – legislative acts, establishment of the units responsible for fighting corruption and for taking many initiatives in order to fight corruption.
In scope of the legislative changes 71 legislative acts were passed, accepted and issued.
There are also currently works on other 13 acts. In scope of educational and training activities 12 training courses are completed, more than 3 thousand people trained, 8 Ethical Codes for the employees of specific offices issued. Regardless of the above, the brochures and information guides had been issued e.g. “The corruption crimes in light of the new criminal regulations” in the Police Headquarters.
Component 1: Civil Service Office
Promoting codes of professional ethics should become an important factor in shaping positive role models – as an element having an impact on increasing the ethical level of public institutions. Professional ethics facilitates doing a given job, influences its prestige, provides social guidelines, sets and justifies the limits of deviation from universal standards, makes duties generally considered special in some cases be treated as basic.
Thanks to an efficient and well-thought-out internal policy, the ethical level of a given institution is determined. If a public institution wants to be seen as competent and efficient, it must be ready to pursue a long-term ethics policy, which is a tool for constructing a culture of ethics.
One of the urgent tasks in the Polish public service is also to translate the solutions concerning the Civil Service Corps onto the level of local self-governments and to form a corps of self-government civil servants, which will limit local civil servants’ involvement in politics and increase their competence.
An essential factor ensuring the effectiveness of system solutions is the cooperation of politicians, including local politicians, civil servants and self-government civil servants, non-governmental organizations and media. All the actions taken should be directed towards changing the social atmosphere around the phenomenon of corruption through education, by developing awareness in the society that corruptive behaviors are unethical and by promoting attitudes of no consent for such situations.
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