Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 16th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview VII. Working Group on Public Sector Transparency Author(s) Piotr Sitniewski Stanislaw Staszic School of Public Administration in Bialystok Bialystok Poland Title Legal aspects of the access to the public information - case of Poland File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Paper would present the legal regulations in Poland which assure the access to the public information. The principle of the openness since a long time has been placed in many acts of international law. It is very symptomatic and characteristic, that the right to information has been acknowledged as one of the human rights, long before than it became this specified in legislations of internal individual states. Such a situation proves a very high impact that exerts international law to the contents of the internal law system. In Poland situation changed after resolution a new Constitution on 2nd April 1997 by National Assembly. The Polish Constitution (1997), in the article 61 introduced entirely new value to the Polish system of governing. This new value is – the citizen’s right to obtain information about the activities of organs of public authority. Since 1st January 2002 in Poland a separate rule about the procedures for receipt of the public information came into force. Everyone has a right to obtain information about all the public matters. Realization of this right can not depend on proving someone’s interest. This act has an elementary matter for guarantee of legal mechanisms concerns openness of public administration’s organs. Principle of the open proceedings should be treated like legacy under a condition, because it should be supported also with the other solutions, not only legal acts. There exists utopian affirmation that introducing into the legal system a principle of the entire openness will cure all the appropriate situations in public administration. There are some kind of information that shouldn’t be given for the public. Sometimes, secrecy appears in the name of the public interest. It is very hard to indicate a marked border between the situations when the principle of openness comes into power in the name of the individual interest, and when it comes from the common interest. Those conflicts, also from the legal point, but also those guarantees I would like to present in my paper.
