Current transformations of the public sphere are changing the perception of forms of participation in democracy by citizens. Apart from institutional forms, non-insti-tutional forms should also be noticed, which are undergoing dynamic changes. The constant tension between the trust arising from the representativeness of democracy and the need of citizens to control those in power is reflected in the needs of vigilance, notification and evaluation. The public sphere thus becomes the theatre of citizens’ actions on different planes – from participating in rallies and initiating legislative procedure to manifesting views in street protests. The proposed study deals with the distinction between institutional and non-institu-tional forms of participation by citizens in democratic processes.

Prawo spółek handlowych będące częścią prawa prywatnego jest przeniknięte przez zasadę autonomii woli. Przeważający pogląd zakłada, że wspomniana zasada wyraża się w obowiązywaniu bardziej szczegółowej zasady wolności umów, zaczerpniętej z prawa zobowiązań. Pomimo istnienia pewnych argumentów przemawiających za tym poglądem bliższa analiza pozwala go zakwestionować. Miarodajne jest tu stanowisko nauki niemieckiej, która zdaje się odchodzić od stosowania tego pojęcia w prawie spółek handlowych na rzecz stosowania bardziej adekwatnego, którym jest zasada wolności zrzeszania się. Treść tej zasady jest bardziej dostosowana do istoty spółki handlowej. Tymczasem próba rozciągnięcia treści zasady wolności umów na całość sytuacji, w której znajduje się wspólnik i spółka handlowa, zwłaszcza kapitałowa, prowadzi do wniosku, że treść tej zasady nie jest adekwatna, a niekiedy wręcz sprzeczna z istotą spółki handlowej. Swoboda kształtowania spraw wewnętrznych w spółce kapitałowej nie przysługuje wspólnikom, ale organowi spółki handlowej, którym jest walne zgromadzenie. W efekcie mając na uwadze Konstytucję RP, która przyznaje obywatelom wolność zrzeszania się, należy sformułować zasadę wolności zrzeszania się w prawie spółek handlowych i zaproponować w oparciu o te przepisy dostosowaną do istoty spółek handlowych treść tej zasady.

The article examines the application of the principle of the active role of the court in the administrative proceedings of the Republic of Kazakhstan and foreign countries. The attention is paid mainly to the identification of the main function and the system of application of this principle. The scientific novelty lies in the study of important subordinate guiding principles, the influence of which is decisive when applying the principle of the active role of the court in the administrative proceedings of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The authors conclude that the judge should apply the principle of the active role of the court in order to have a fair trial within a reasonable time.

The aim of the study is a comprehensive analysis of the legislation on the fight against illegal employment both at the supranational level of the European Union and at the EU Member States level, inter alia, in Poland, France, and Germany. The leading method in the study was the comparative-legal method. It helped to compare the peculiarities of the practice of European countries in the field of combating illegal employment in the EU Member States, as well as to identify how this issue is regulated. The results demonstrate that illegal employment destroys legal jobs, leads to the increase in unemployment and deprives the state of revenues such as tax and social contributions, etc. That is why international declarations and conventions should guarantee the right to work in the European Union for the citizens of non-European states.

The article examines theoretical and practical problems concerning the realisation of participatory democracy’s potential for forming and implementing state policy on counteracting epidemics. The article is aimed at the study of participatory democracy as a tool of state’s interaction with the public while counteracting epidemics throughout history, from antiquity to the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Comparative, comparative legal, systemic-structural, dialectical, historical and other scientific methods have been employed to examine the issues discussed in the article. The application of the aforementioned methods is conducted on the interdisciplinary scientific basis.

: According to Article 15(1) of the UDHR, ‘everyone has the right to a nationality’. Although the quoted provision looks deceptively straightforward, the determination of its content is not an easy task. Past research has been mainly focused on the problem of statelessness which was the historical reason for the introduction of the right in question. In this paper, I argue that holding the status of a formal national is not enough to have the right to a nationality secured. To show this, first, I analyse the difference between the concepts of ‘nationality’ and ‘citizenship’ with special attention paid to the cultural component of national identity. Second, I investigate the understanding of a nationality as ‘the right to have rights’. On the basis of the research on the statelessness I ask what challenges are faced by people without the formal nationality of any state and I show that being a national of certain states is equivalent to being stateless with respect to certain fundamental rights of an individual. Thus, the right to a nationality is indeed ‘the right to have rights’, but only if it is a right to a right nationality. In consequence, I suggest that (1) any state which recognises the right guaranteed in Article 15 of the UDHR should embrace its full content by readiness to accept as nationals those whose original nationality does not guarantee the protection of their first-order rights or is based on values clearly contradictory to their own; (2) peoples from failed states should be able to acquire new citizenship in a country of maximal cultural affinity, with regard to the economic effectiveness of the latter; (3) the obtaining of new citizenship may legitimately be conditioned by demand on compliance with the system of values of the nationality granted.

The COVID-19 pandemic, placing societies and governments in an exceptional situation in every respect, has had an impact on the legal order of individual countries. It pressed them, on the one hand, to take swift and decisive actions and, on the other hand – to a necessary thorough assessment and considering of the costs and consequences, both legal and economic, of the introduced measures, often related to the constraints of constitutionally guaranteed civil liberties. Although Sweden during the pandemic seemingly chose a path different from other European countries, keeping social life largely unaffected, in its essence this strategy did not differ much from those used in other countries. The aim of the article is to present the solutions adopted in Sweden and to analyse the Swedish strategy against the background of constitutional civil liberties.

The constitutionalization of the referendum and law making citizens’ initiatives makes them important institutions and also important tools for exercising direct democracy. The question that arises today is the effective usage of these tools, in the framework of enhancing the direct participation of the citizens in governance. Particularly, in countries like Albania, which represents one of the newest democracies established after the fall of the Communist regime in Europe, the exercising of these instruments encounters different challenges, coming up especially due to lack of traditions and practices in exercising direct democracy, legislation vacuum and the insufficiency of organizational experiences of the civil society. Nevertheless, some experiences in particular have been achieved in the last 15 years, after the current Constitution of the Republic of Albania was enacted. Out of the
direct democracy instruments that are sanctioned in the Constitution of the Republic of Albania, this paper will focus only upon the law making citizens’ initiative and on the abrogative referendum initiative, as well. Legislation, jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court and some other issues identified through the experiences established in Albania will be treated in this paper. These experiences are analyzed in a comparative point of
view with the experiences of other countries, particularly Italy.

Artykuł przedstawia tajwańską percepcję prawa kultury zachodniej, historyczne pochodzenie procedury administracyjnej Tajwanu oraz jej rozwój od końca XIX wieku do czasu reformy w 1998 roku. Przedmiotem analizy jest rosnący zakres ochrony praw jednostki wprowadzany w drodze kolejnych reform – w kontekście tajwańskiej demokracji. Przedstawiono porównanie tajwańskiej i japońskiej drogi westernizacji systemów prawa administracyjnego ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem przyjęcia rozwiązań prawa niemieckiego. Dyskusja prowadzona jest na tle prawa międzynarodowego i poparta została danymi statystycznymi. W artykule wskazano, że Tajwan uniknął losu krajów, w których westernizacja prawa doprowadziła jedynie do tworzenia „martwych przepisów”. porównanie danych statystycznych prowadzi do wniosku, że obywatele Tajwanu wykorzystują możliwości prowadzenia sporów na gruncie prawa administracyjnego częściej niż w Japonii. System sądownictwa administracyjnego dobrze funkcjonuje i cieszy się rosnącym zaufaniem obywateli.

The article is an attempt to analyse the relationship between private security enterprises and citizens. Explored is what access to safety information has the user of guarded premises. The paper examined the regulations of private security firms and the requirements of keeping available monitoring records. The article reviews records of interviews with employees and managers, in which their work were discussed. The material used in this article are the result of controlled experiments carried out by a student research group operating within the framework of project NCN Opus 5 and headed by prof. Jolanta Jabłońska-Bonca. Under an established scenario, in which students took on different roles, the group were able to study the tendency of security personnel to disclose information related to their work. Parts of the conversations referred to in the text have been anonymised. The authentic spelling was retained to reflect in full a profile of a given worker and to give the reader an opportunity to perceive the atmosphere of the interviewing process.

Subjects of rights originating from inherent human rights are among the subjects of public subjective rights. A deliberation on the matter of natural persons and legal persons, perceived as subjects of these rights, makes it possible to determine a number of questionable issues, which are surely reflected in the materialisation of these public subjective rights in legal practice. The subject matter is very complex, if only on account of the necessity to make use of the results of the linguistic interpretation of the notion of citizen. This is vital even though a legal definition of citizen exists. The intricate nature of the problem in question is also a consequence of the need to make a distinction in the area of the possibility to grant public subjective rights originating from inherent human rights to citizens, non-citizens under the jurisdiction of the Polish state, and non-citizens outside the jurisdiction of the Polish state. Another highly problematic aspect is the possibility to apply an analogy in the field of assignment of subjective public rights originating from inherent human rights to legal persons. Since the very application of analogies in this domain is controversial, it seems reasonable to stress the lack of possibility to consider legal persons as subjects of public subjective rights originating from inherent human rights such as life or health.

The article analyzes the idea of the so-called “golden visas” or the possibility of purchasing citizenship or permanent residency offered by some countries. There are numerous controversies about this solution, and the defenders and opponents have many rguments for and against it. Arguments presented in the article confirm that at this stage, it is not possible to abandon this solution. However, it is possible to see problems arising from the existence of this institution and to introduce appropriate safeguards so that possible negative effects are minimized.

After six years of Polish local government authorities practising participatory budgeting only within the framework of locally regulated consultation procedures, the year 2018 marked the official establishment of the statutory basis of the instrument in question. The adoption of statutory regulations for participatory budgeting has, on the one hand, legitimised the current practices of local government authorities to some extent, but on the other hand, making participatory budgets an obligatory instrument in towns and cities with poviat rights has warped the idea of participation. The article offers an assessment of the application of the new statutory basis of participatory budgeting in the light of the provisions regulating the planning and spending of public expenditure, accompanied by remarks on the origin of adoption of this instrument in other countries. The main aim of the article is to make the said assessment while maintaining a balance between the arguments for and against the utility of participatory budgeting from the perspective of Polish local government authorities. The discussion featured in the article
comes with a question raised thus far quite rarely in the relevant literature: what
is the legal nature of public expenditure spent within the framework of a participatory
budget?

The aim of the article is to outline the relationship between the rule of law and civic engagement in the public sphere and to attempt to answer the question whether the rule of law can be an effective tool in preventing the transformation of democracy in a tyranny of the majority; whether it can also create optimal conditions for democracy to develop. In other words, does the rule of law serve democracy and political engagement or does it rather limit the spontaneity of civic activity because stability cannot be reconciled with the freedom of citizens? The current ‘juridification’ of the public domain (the expansion of law into various areas of social existence) marginalises the validity and scope of civic presence in the decision-making process in the name of law-abidingness and the neutrality of instruments of control and of choices made by the ruling power. Can the effective solution to this situation be the opening of the concept of the rule of law to the idea of political
nature and the expansion of the domain of grassroots participation?

W artykule przedstawiono wycinek działalności instytucji Europejskiego Rzecznika Praw Obywatelskich odnoszącej się do niewłaściwego administrowania organów unijnych w dziedzinie równego traktowania. Analizie poddane zostały najważniejsze zagadnienia związane z nieprzestrzeganiem zakazu dyskryminacji – zasady ogólnej prawa UE – przez instytucje i organy unijne. Zaprezentowano ewolucję zakresu ochrony praw jednostek w działalności systemu instytucjonalnego UE. Sformułowano próbę oceny, czy proces ten przebiega w sposób satysfakcjonujący, czy też wymagane są radykalne zmiany w podejściu do przedstawionego problemu.

Przedmiotem opracowania jest uchwalony przez parlament brytyjski w 1998 r. Human Rights Act (HRA) i jego wpływ na rozumienie pojęcia organu administracji publicznej w prawie angielskim. Uzasadnieniem podjęcia tematu jest ukazanie rozwoju doktryny brytyjskiego prawa administracyjnego pod wpływem prawa międzynarodowego na wskutek inkorporacji Europejskiej Konwencji Praw Człowieka. W artykule ukazano drogę Wielkiej Brytanii do implementacji Konwencji i związanie się jej przepisami, a także zmianę w definiowaniu organu władzy publicznej (public authority). Wskazano również, że pojęcie organu administracji publicznej na gruncie HRA w Wielkiej Brytanii jest węższe od tej przyjętej na gruncie prawa polskiego i tym samym istnieje mniejsza ochrona obywateli brytyjskich przed działaniem administracji publicznej w tym państwie.