Every summer for the past four years, human rights activists have been crisscrossing Poland, accompanied by jurists and lawyers, to talk about the Constitution and the role of republican institutions.
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This “Tour of the Constitution” includes 59 stages, with a two-hour conference in each city crossed that the volunteers do everything to make interactive and fun, by including games for example.
The goal for them is really to interest as many people as possible in democratic issues, to fill in big gaps on the subject. “When you talk to people, you can see that knowledge of the law in Poland is unfortunately not great.explains the emeritus judge of the Constitutional Council Wojciech Hermelinski, who is participating for the third consecutive year. Constitutional issues, separation of powers, the powers of the Senate and the lower house, the government and the president… School curricula should integrate all of this !”
This original initiative was born in 2021, in reaction to the subjugation of judicial institutions by the ultra-conservative PiS government. The party had notably taken control of the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Court and the National Council of the Judiciary, and judges who opposed the government risked disciplinary sanctions.
Following his election last winter, Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said he wants to restore the rule of law and the independence of the courts in Poland. But Kinga Dagmara Siadlak, the co-chair of the “Tour of the Constitution,” assures that she will continue to crisscross the country: “It is precisely because there was a lack of education on these issues that a populist power was able to gain access to the head of the country. If citizens consider that it is good, that the matter is settled, that there is no longer any need to educate themselves on the issue, it will be just as easy to manipulate them once again.”
