The State Treasury will pay for incorrectly issued administrative decisions. There will be compensation

• Polish President Andrzej Duda has signed an amendment to the Act on the Development of Land Communities, which will enable persons who, as a result of a decision issued in violation of the law, were not entitled to participate in a land community to apply for compensation.
• Payment of money from the state budget will be possible even if it was final, i.e. when 5 years have passed since the decision was issued.
• The opinions of local government officials on the issue of overturning final decisions are divided.

The changes are introduced by the amendment to the Act on the Development of Land Communities signed on May 7 by President Andrzej Duda.

Let us recall that it is the starost who issues a decision to determine which properties constitute a land community, who is entitled to it and in what amount of shares they have. The act signed by the president assumes that despite the passage of 5 years from the date of the decision becoming final, a person aggrieved by such a decision will be able to apply for a declaration that the decision was issued in violation of the law. For this person, this will constitute a basis for claiming compensation before a common court, but it will not allow them to have shares in the community.

There are currently 5,100 land communities in Poland with a total area of ​​about 107,000 ha, which are a relic of ownership relations that emerged in the 19th century in the former Russian and Austrian partitions as a result of the liquidation of serfdom. These are lands common to a given village, in which individual farmers had shares depending on the area of ​​their farms.

Grzegorz Nowosielski, former mayor of Wyszków, explains that since the act on the development of land communities was passed in 1963, there have been doubts as to who is entitled to participate in the community, because farmers did not always write a will. - It often turns out that according to the documentation prepared by the community board and issued in the form of a decision by the starost, not everyone who feels entitled is actually entitled according to the regulations. Then emotions and a sense of injustice appear in the communities of some people - says Grzegorz Nowosielski. As he adds, the injured party is then entitled to file a claim in a common court. They also bear the burden of presenting evidence, which can be difficult because there are often no documents.

According to data from the Supreme Audit Office from 2015, up to 3,500 communities have no regulated legal status. Ultimately, these areas were to be regulated as a result of the amendment to the Act on the Development of Land Communities from 2015. According to Article 8a of the Act, a person entitled to participate in a land community could submit an application to determine whether they are entitled to participate in the community until the end of 2016.

Now the regulations have been amended.

The regulations that have just been amended were introduced with the intention of finally closing the issue of determining the shareholders of land communities. By introducing the amendment, to put it bluntly, they potentially dug up the matter. If the authorities want to determine that a decision was issued in violation of the law, they will first have to check whether the person who applies for it had the right to file an application for their share in the land community at all. This means that the factual circumstances that the authorities have already established for the purposes of a declaratory decision, not a constitutive one, will be checked again. Reconsidering applications of people who missed the deadline does not serve legal certainty. Moreover, the Ministry of Justice had a similar opinion

- says Adrian Pokrywczyński, expert from the Association of Polish Counties.

During the work on the bill, Deputy Minister of Agriculture Jacek Czerniak confirmed that compensation would not be granted automatically, and that its entitlement would have to be proven in court. Compensation is to be paid from the state budget.

- It is difficult to say how many decisions would be issued in our area in violation of the law, this would be investigated. It is also not known how much the compensation would be. However, importantly, so far in our county it has not been confirmed that any decision was issued in violation of the law - says Małgorzata Ostrowska, director of the Department of Geodesy, Cadastre and Real Estate of the County Office in Biała Podlaska.

- It is difficult to determine the scale of decisions issued in violation of the law, although it seems that in the Siedlce district, officials have always exercised due diligence, so I do not expect decisions issued in violation of the law - says the starosta of Siedlce, Karol Tchórzewski, emphasizing that overturning final decisions if they were issued in violation of the law is a right idea.

The Senate did not estimate the financial consequences of the amendment. However, it concludes that the risk of compensation being paid will be small, because in the counties audited by the Supreme Audit Office, no decisions issued in violation of the law have been identified. However, such situations do occur, because one of the injured parties submitted a motion to the Senate to change the law in this matter, and it was in response to this motion that the provisions of the act on the development of land communities were amended.

Former mayor of Wyszków Grzegorz Nowosielski believes that instead of considering the issue of amendment in the context of final decisions, the 1963 Act should be comprehensively analysed and amended to adapt it to contemporary conditions.

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development is currently analyzing the regulations, after which a thorough amendment to the act is possible.