Interventions The schedule of the First President of the Supreme Court is public information – a landmark ruling by the Voivodeship Administrative Court. The Supreme Court refused to disclose the calendar of its First President, considering it an internal document. We challenged this response in court and won. The court confirmed that, in the part…
Interventions With hunting regards Is it possible to find out how the regional boards of the Polish Hunting Association operate and how they spend funds related to hunting management? We decided to check by submitting information requests to all 49 regional boards. Most either refused to respond or remained silent—only after more than a year…
Interventions Transparency of salaries in municipal football clubs As Citizens Network Watchdog Poland, we asked GKS Katowice and Piast Gliwice about salaries in clubs financed with public funds. In Katowice, we obtained specific data – the club disclosed the remuneration of members of the management board and the supervisory board. In the case of Piast…
Interventions Together with other civil society organisations, we submitted comments on the draft law implementing the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA). Although some of the earlier proposals have been taken into account, the document fails to meet the standards arising from EU law in many key areas. The draft focuses primarily on the current model…
Interventions For several months, our organization has been actively advocating to ensure that the contract registers, which public institutions in Poland will soon be required to maintain, include information on all contracts they conclude. The government, however, proposed a bill introducing a publication threshold of 10,000 PLN, meaning that more than 70% of contracts concluded…
Interventions Central Register of Contracts For the past four years, we have been advocating for the law adopted by the Polish Parliament in 2021 — which requires all public institutions to maintain a central register of contracts — to become a real tool for overseeing public finances. In the meantime, another election has taken place…
Interventions Together with the Institute of Public Finance, we submitted a petition to the Chancellery of the Prime Minister regarding the Central Register of Contracts, which is to come into force in Poland in January 2026. The Central Register of Contracts (CRU) is an ICT system created for entities performing public tasks, whose purpose is…
It is with great sadness that we bid farewell to Zenon Michajłowski, one of the founders and members of the Watchdog Poland Civic Network. He was with us from the very beginning and remained actively interested and involved in transparency issues throughout his life. Few people in Poland can boast such a long and consistent…
Interventions Together with other organizations, we appealed to, among others, the Speakers of the Sejm and Senate as well as parliamentary groups and circles, for the swift disclosure of information about the candidates for the position of President of the Supreme Audit Office (the highest state audit body in Poland) and for the organization…
Summary of the report The entire report is available at this link In 2024, we continued our intensive efforts to protect the right to information, strengthen transparency in public life and support civic engagement. One of the most important events was the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights, which found that the refusal…
Madrid, 16 June 2025 – Access Info Europe today announces the launch of the Helen Darbishire Award which celebrates those who have used their right to information to have a positive impact on society. The Helen Darbishire Award (previously the Access Info Impact Award) recognises those who have significantly leveraged their right to information to…
The Polish anti-SLAPP bill includes a number of important mechanisms that could effectively limit the abuse of legal proceedings against journalists and activists. However, the criteria proposed for applying key safeguards are too restrictive to be effective in practice – even in classic SLAPP cases – and do not take into account the realities of…
Together with over 300 other organizations from across Europe, we have signed an open letter on the Hungarian draft law on “transparency in public life” addressed to the President of the European Commission and the Commissioner for Democracy, Justice, and the Rule of Law. The proposed law is yet another attempt to restrict freedom of…
Interventions On June 12, 2017, a law came into force in Poland, according to which institutions should correspond with each other exclusively by electronic means. We have noticed, as an association, that the public institutions with whom we correspond often reflexively respond with a traditional letter. It’s the power of habit, which costs taxpayers a…
Citizens are constitutionally entitled to observe and record plenary sessions of the Sejm and Senate [the two chambers of the Polish parliament]. Arguing such rights with the Marshal’s Guards barring a citizen from entering, however, is another matter altogether. The Senate Marshal, Mr Stanisław Karczewski, published on the Senate’s website a statement claiming that [opposition]…
Interventions In July 2016 Warsaw hosted a NATO summit. As there were multiple estimates regarding the cost of organising the event, we decided to send a request for public information to its main organiser, the Ministry of National Defence. We asked for disclosure of the report that the Ministry submitted to the prime minister after…
As we have been dealing with the transparency of political parties’ activity for quite a while, the time has come now for a short review. What have we managed to achieve? There is no clear-cut evidence of how (if at all) parties’ attitudes towards the right to information have changed. Nonetheless, it can be stated…
