Analysis of Constitutional Tribunal judgments and arguments regarding reprivatisation of the Warsaw real estate market

A highly regarded international academic journal, the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, has published an article by Gniewomir Wycichowski-Kuchta, a legislator and expert in the Regulatory Affairs, Legislation and Compliance Practice, in which the author analyses decisions handed down by the Constitutional Tribunal in cases relating to the reprivatisation of Warsaw real estate.

In the article, our expert recalls that, in the absence of an appropriate privatisation law, which was supposed to appear after 1989, the Warsaw authorities decided to return pre-war real estate in all cases in which the Bierut Decree was breached. According to the author of the analysis, the failure to regulate this issue as part of a comprehensive legal solution opened the way for breaches and meant that the whole process could generate a great deal of public controversy.

Gniewomir Wycichowski-Kuchta, Associate, presents the results of the study, the main objective of which was to analyse and assess the argumentation strategies adopted by the judges of the Constitutional Tribunal in reprivatisation cases and to discuss changes in the case law over more than 30 years. Given the Constitutional Tribunal's position in the Polish legal system, these decisions have an extremely significant impact on the shaping of the socio-political situation.

The article, which is an analysis of the study carried out, is published in English in open access on the publisher's website Springer.