Postępowanie doraźne a problem niezawisłości sędziów i niezależności sądów
A summary proceeding and the issue of judge and court independence

Summary/Abstract: Many changes in pre-war regulations allowing the communists to use them under new socio-political circumstances were made in the first years of the People’s Republic of Poland. A decree from March 19 1928 was replaced with a decree from November 16 1945 on a summary proceeding (Dz.U. nr 53, poz. 301). The “defectiveness” of the realization of the aims of the criminal politics of a summary judiciary caused a situation in which the ministry of justice considered releasing circulars reminding the courts of the aims underpinning an introduction of the summary procedure as appropriate as early as before the amendment of the decree proceeding from 1946. Top-down, the attempts were made to influence judge verdicts who were to be theoretically limited by only the regulations of the act. The amendment of the decree of a summary proceeding from 1949, the chance to appeal to sentences made by a prosecutor was eliminated. After a breakthrough in October 1956, the ministry committee investigating the reflexes of legal violation in the Stalin period, evaluated one-instance of the summary procedure as being “far from the ideal of legality”. The regulations of the decree from November 16 1945 on summary proceedings with later changes did not influence the obedience to the principle of court and judge independence in the People’s Republic of Poland. A negative influence brought a practical application of the decree on summary proceedings or, rather, yet another example of avoiding its resolutions by the communist authorities. A common summary judiciary managed not to be involved into the mechanism of infringement. The very procedure, however, was to be fully used in front of the military courts where the court and judge independence were just empty slogans.

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