The aim of the article was to analyse the legal and financial status of the BBN, that is the office which carries out tasks resulting from the constitutionally defined role of the President of the Republic of Poland as the supreme commander of the armed forces and as a guardian of the sovereignty and security of the State. In the fol­lowing parts of the article the origin of BBN, as well as its legal and financial status were presented and analysed. The implementation of the research objectives made it possible to formulate the conclusion that the lack of financial separation of the Bureau creates serious problems in the course of financial management, as well as impelled to the formulation of a proposal to modify the financial status of the institution.

The intense development of nanotechnology in recent years poses the basic question about the safety of employees who work with nanomaterials. The study attempts to determine how employers should regulate health protection when working with nanoparticles. Employers should be aware of the importance of the risks associated with nanotechnology and their responsibility for worker health and safety. The study is a continuation of the author’s previous analyses of ways to regulate occupational safety and health in the use of nanomaterials. The author examines the theory of responsive regulation in the context of health and safety with nano-materials and the importance of dialogue in this regulatory process. The regulatory agencies should intervene in this area depending on the attainment of the assumed objectives of the law. The sense of responsibility for the effect could improve the quality of OH&S with nanomaterials.

Management control should be understood as the totality of measures taken to ensure that public objectives and tasks are carried out in a lawful, efficient, economical and timely manner. As a result, this control is therefore intended to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the entire Polish public administration. Of great importance in the control process is the stage of risk identification, as perceiving a given risk will allow to effectively counteract it. According to management control standards, an annual report in the form of a statement is recommended for this purpose. To facilitate control, the Ministry of Finance has drawn up a template that managers of units can use when assessing the state of management control. In this article, the author not only characterizes management control, but also analyzes the statements made by public finance sector entities. This was to verify whether public finance sector entities not only understand the objectives of the introduction of management control, but also whether they correctly complete the provided template of the declaration, thus contributing to the effective operation of public administration.

The amendment of Article 209 of the Polish Criminal Code, which took place on 31 May 2017 with the entry into force of the Act of 23 March 2017 on Amendments to the Criminal Code Act and the Act on Assistance to Persons Entitled to Maintenance (Journal of Laws of 2017, item 952), resulted in significant changes not only in the wording of the said article itself, but also in the picture of the statistical effects of pre-trial and court proceedings for the crime in question. From the very beginning, the said amendment raised questions and reservations among a substantial number of supporters of the established line of judicial decisions issued in the domain of criminal law. They considered it unfit to keep to the principles of adequacy and proportionality, as well as posing a threat to a significant – and ultimately destructive – increase in the burden on law enforcement authorities and the judiciary in general. At the same time, taking into account the main objectives and ideas of the amendment, which was intended in particular to improve the enforcement of maintenance obligations, it needs to be said that it proved ineffective and was actually a manifestation of penal populism.

The purpose of the article is to propose a concept of the collective right to food which may turn out to be essential in fighting hunger and malnutrition on a global scale. International agreements, including Pacts on Human Rights, overlook the rights of indigenous peoples by corresponding to the individualistic, state-centric, consumeristic and commercial vision of the right to food. An approach, which is based on the objectives of critical studies on law, to the official dogma of the right to food (developed within expert and intergovernmental bodies in the form of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights) allows for claiming that the dogma is less legitimized than the collective right to food (defined in the Decla-ration of Atitlán) resulting from the indigenous peoples’ practice. This is why, remaining in the sphere of the official, Grotian international legal order, it should be acknowledged that the indigenous peoples’ right to food defined in the article is a part of third-generation rights (next to the second-generation individualistic right to food) while remaining strictly connected to the right to self-determination and the right to development. It is a result of the long-term practice of those peoples. The above-mentioned proposal of the third-generation right to food has not been applied to the legal doctrine so far. Its value is the opportunity to develop and study the concept of food sovereignty that allows one to more effectively combat hunger and malnutrition on a global scale as compared to the previous actions of international communities.

The publication examines the legal nature of wars, looks into the law of war genesis, reviews its conventions, as well as identifies the aim, objectives, causes together with the consequences of Russia’s military aggression on February 24, 2022; it provides a testimony on the war of aggression against Ukraine and identifies its threats to post-war international law and order. The aim of the article is to determine the background, nature, fundamentals and nature of the war the Russian Federation launched on February 24, 2022 against Ukraine within the context of confrontation with the values of Western democracy. Historical-legal dialectical, comparative-legal and system-structural methods, as well as methods of formal logic (induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, abstraction and concretization, etc.) were used to study the issues. The application of these research methods entails a cross-sectoral scientific nature.
Wars have accompanied the entire history of mankind. Since the 17th century the theoretical foundations of the law of war have been laid, which enshrined in international laws and customs of warfare (Geneva Conventions, Hague Convention, etc.) since the 19th century, thus forming the international humanitarian law. After World War II, violations of the latter by the belligerent party are viewed by the world community no less harshly than the mere war. The paper questions the purpose, reasons, conditions and intermediate consequences of the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. Obviously, the military aggression and the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022 marked the beginning of the de facto war, under a specific formal definition by a Russian official as a “special military operation” instead of naming it an attempt to avoid legal responsibility for war crimes committed in Ukraine. The article analyses the aggressive nature of this war on the part of the Russian Federation, demonstrates numerous violations of international law conventions by the Russian armed forces during the military invasion and temporary occupied territories in Ukraine. It emphasizes that the law of war has always been replaced by signing a peace treaty and relevant international agreements, which entails the obligation to severe the political, economic, and legal responsibility of the state violating international humanitarian law. The paper reviews the key institutions and legal tools for bringing the Russian Federation authorities to justice for the war crimes committed in Ukraine. So far, the President of Ukraine, the Supreme Council of Ukraine, and the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine have managed to apply legitimate international legal
mechanisms, primarily the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council, to prosecute Russia for violating the international humanitarian law and committing war crimes in Ukraine. At the same time, on the Ukrainian territories currently liberated from the Russian army’s occupation (Bucha, Gostomel, Irpin, etc.), it is already possible to implement a special mechanism of justice, which consists in the collaboration between national and international experts: specialists, investigators, prosecutors, and judges to collect objective and impartial evidence of gross violations of international law and war conventions in Ukraine. It is obvious that for Ukraine today both the victory and just punishment for the committed and continuing committed war crimes on its territory are important. The aftermath of World War II’s “Never Again” now requires, as never before, its effective guarantee and protection

The article covers the issue of the functioning of one of the advisory bodies of central governmental administration, i.e. the Council for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Affairs, which is associated with the President of the National Atomism Agency (PAA), the chief nuclear supervision body in Poland, which is the competent authority in nuclear safety and radiation protection affairs, as defined in the Atomic Law (Prawo atomowe). The article presents the objectives of the functioning of the Council as an advisory body to the nuclear supervision authority on the basis of international and European law and the views of the nuclear energy law doctrine. In relation to the Council, an important role is played by soft law acts, especially the so-called IAEA safety standards. Despite the fact that they are not legally binding, they constitute a valuable and extensive collection of recommendations supporting regional and national legislative activity. The purpose of this study is also a critical analysis of the amendment to the Atomic Law from 2016 in the section relating to changes made to the way of shaping the Council’s make-up. They caused the loss of one of the Council’s most important attributes, i.e. independence in the decision-making process and they deprived the President of the PAA (decision-making body) of influence on shaping its make-up. The changes introduced should be interpreted as an unequivocal negation of the ratio legis of appointing the Council and a significant step backwards in relation to the existing practice and legislative trends in recent years. The author postulates restoring the previous legal solutions as the ones that will allow the Council, the advisory body, to fulfil its function in the right way, really supporting the decision-making authority for which it works.

Interpretation is one of key notions on the convergence axis of law and literature. Both lawyers and literary scholars during their practices focus on interpreting complex language texts, establishing the meaning of expressions, reconstructing the sender’s intention, penetrating the influence of the text on the recipient, i.e. questions which turn out to be fundamental in both legal as well as literary texts. Analysis of the legal and literary interpretations allows us to identify differences as well as certain analogies between these two spheres of activity. They may be analysed through referring to the specificity of the entities participating in the interpretative practice, which are the sender and the recipient. The essential difference between interpretation in law and interpretation in literature consists of the rule that a legal text should be interpreted in the way that produces an unequivocal result. On the other hand, in the case of literary interpretation, it is difficult to reach a precise or unequivocal effect of reading the sense. Moreover, in literary interpretation it is not required. In a legal text and in a literary text the author-sender’s intention plays an important role. However, in the case of literary interpretation it is possible to apply a more flexible approach to the reconstruction of the author’s intention than in legal interpretation, where it is necessary to take into consideration rules and objectives of law only. The separateness of legal interpretation is justified foremost by the fact that it is specific purpose-oriented, which is establishing the meaning of the substance of applicable law.

Women’s rights are an inseparable part of the human rights, and human rights are an integrated part of women’s rights. The Swedish Government has adopted a concept of feminist foreign policy, aiming at strengthening these rights on a global level. Women’s rights are continued to be violated as much as ever, hindering democracy, peace, rule of law, sustainable development and economic growth – the overarching aims of international policy. Women’s rights to education, financial resources and access to the labour market are crucial in defending human rights and having a policy for 100 per cent of the world’s population. A priority task of the feminist foreign policy is supporting women’s inclusion in all decision-making structures, both on national and multilateral level. This in order to achieve wider foreign, development and security policy objectives through a new approach, different way of thinking and different solutions.

The recent pandemic has forced us in 2020 to rethink the priority of access to medical care. The purpose of this article is to offer a brief account of how two countries – Sweden and the US – have reacted to the pandemic. The authors wish to show how the functions of the regulations and guidelines applied by hospitals and institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic differ from the objectives of health policies based on the principles of the distributive justice theory. The article will thus risk a preliminary assessment of the role of law in a crisis. A short summary of the main points of the distributive justice theory will be followed by an analysis of two cases: the guidelines issued by local authorities in Sweden and the American models applied during the COVID-19 pandemic. The conducted analysis results in a thesis that the objective of the justice theory differs from the regulations actually applied. In the case of Sweden, the recommendations seem to clearly prioritise the life of young people over the life of the elderly, even if there is no shortage of resources. In the case of the United States, we can see more objectives of distributive justice implemented in the analysed triages, but they are still not free from discrimination. The authors therefore call for an improvement of mobility of medical care resources in order to mitigate crises. The cognitive value has an international quality, and is aimed at Polish audiences dealing with the problems in question, be it at the level of a hospital or legislation.

A discussion on the law studies and the legal apprenticeship system in Poland has been offered in the article from the point of view of a question about the objectives of educating lawyers and about whether the current system of legal education is appropriate. By pointing to the system-determined role of lawyers pursuing their profession within institutionalised structures of the system of justice, the article concentrates, among others, on issues concerning the selection of the subjects to be taught. But especially on the dilemma whether legal education should produce skilled law technicians or elites co-shaping the ethical, intellectual, cultural, and economic profile of society. The views contained in the article are presented starting from an assessment of the significance of market knowledge through a determination of the utility of curricula for further professional development of lawyers both as actual lawyers and pursuing other professions and ending with a comparison of teaching broken down into traditional branches of law and newly-forming fields thereof. The article addresses also the claims for opening law to interdisciplinarity and the role of lawyer as a profession of trust in the context of a constant need to reinforce the trust in law itself.