A win before the Provincial Administrative Court (WSA) in Warsaw – the end of arbitrary suspension of administrative proceedings?
Today a justification of the judgment of the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw dated December 14, 2009 in case IV Sa/Wa 1674/09 was delivered to the office.
With this judgment, the court reversed the decision of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development and the preceding decision of the Governor of Wielkopolska to suspend the administrative proceedings. The proceedings before the governor were initiated by the former owners of the landed property, who demanded that parts of the property (the palace and park complex) not fall under the provisions of the agrarian reform decree. However, the governor did not issue a decision but suspended the proceedings, arguing that a legal question from another case on the constitutionality of those provisions of the agrarian reform decree that are the basis for the governor’s determination that the property does not fall under the decree’s provisions is pending before the Constitutional Court.
This position was disagreed with by the applicant, who first in a complaint and then in a complaint to the WSA in Warsaw argued that mere proceedings by the TC in a similar case could not justify the suspension of analogous proceedings,
because it would lead to paralysis of public administration activities, and moreover, that the completion of administrative proceedings is possible faster than the resolution of the issue by the Constitutional Court. This argumentation was shared by the WSA in Warsaw, which stated, among other things, that “the mandatory suspension of administrative proceedings for the reason that the Constitutional Court is considering the issue of the compliance of certain regulations with the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, could cause paralysis of administrative activity, translating into a reduction in the certainty of turnover. Thus, the court significantly restricted the policy of administrative bodies, which in many cases automatically suspended proceedings until similar cases were resolved by the Constitutional Court. The WSA in Warsaw supported the presumption of constitutionality of existing laws and, in its guidelines, recommended that administrative bodies conduct administrative proceedings without looking at the case pending before the Constitutional Court.