Uwarunkowania środowiskowe ochrony ludności i obrony cywilnej – analiza prawna na tle ustawy z dnia 5 grudnia 2024 r.

Abstrakt

The Act of 5 December 2024 on Civil Protection and Civil Defence ended the period in which the Polish civil defence system lacked a statutory basis. This article examines one aspect of that Act: its relationship with environmental law. The author advances a two-part thesis. First, the Act singles out the environment as a protected good within the civil protection system and gives its protection autonomous significance; this follows from a consistent construction comprising the definition of civil protection, the definition of a threat, the catalogue of tasks, and the definition of essential infrastructure. Second, through the design of the threat detection system, the legislature has permanently incorporated institutions of environmental law into the architecture of civil security, listing environmental monitoring systems in Article 70(2)(6) as a component of that system. The analysis covers statutory definitions, evacuation planning, the threat detection, notification, warning and alarm systems, collective protection structures together with the technical requirements for protective buildings, the funding mechanism guaranteeing no less than 0.3% of gross domestic product, and the rules on liability and remediation. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights, the Supreme Court and the administrative courts is taken into account, as is the Act’s relationship with European Union law. Four areas of normative inconsistency requiring legislative intervention are identified: the absence of a sector-specific mechanism for transmitting monitoring data to civil protection authorities, the absence of a general duty of mutual consideration between external emergency plans and civil protection plans, the lack of a subsidiary mechanism for remedying environmental damage, and the mismatch between the Act’s allocation of competences and the division of government departments. The legal situation incorporates amendments up to July 2026.