Individual Constitutional Complaints in Poland and Germany. How do Procedural Differences Affect the Position of the Courts?

Abstract

The tendency to compare the Polish Constitutional Court with its German counterpart produces an illusion that the two institutions not only enjoy almost identical positions in their respective countries, but also that they follow the same procedures and have almost identical powers of adjudication, making the actual position of both institutions similar. The paper deals with the differences in proceedings on constitutional complaints in Poland and Germany and their importance for the actual position of the two courts. The narrow model of constitutional complaint in Poland after 1997 (in particular the possibility to complain solely ‘about the regulation’ and not any about any action of the state) has given a relatively narrow range of ruling to the Polish court from the very beginning. In contrast, due to the extensive access German citizens have to constitutional complaints, its German counterpart issues a wide range of verdicts in different fields of life, and their power resembles that of precedents in Anglo-Saxon law. Thus, one reason for the relatively minor importance of the Constitutional Court in Poland is the limited access of citizens to lodge constitutional complaints, which results in a smaller number of verdicts, making it impossible to develop such a wide range of verdicts as is the case in Germany. After all, the significance of the court depends, inter alia, on the number of verdicts issued, which equates to the number of matters regulated by its rulings.