ABSTRACT
The Commissioner has now referred several complaints for arbitration by the Constitutional Tribunal. Two recent examples have been cases involving the introduction of religious education in schools and abortion. In a country where 90 per cent of the population are Roman Catholic and where the Church stood as a bulwark resisting Communist oppression for over 40 years, both these issues are obviously of great moral and social significance. In both, the Commissioner took a relatively liberal stance which was not upheld by the Constitutional Court. In the religious education case, the Commissioner argued that making provision for religious education in the state schools constituted an infringement of the secular nature of the State and also that it infringed citizens’ rights to privacy because parents and pupils opting into or out of religious education classes would have to reveal their religious beliefs or non-belief. The Constitutional Court, however, argued that religious education classes were not an infringement of citizens’ liberties so long as they were voluntary and completely separate from the rest of the school curriculum. In the abortion case, a doctor had refused to issue a statement of reasons to enable a woman to have an abortion, which is permitted under Polish law where a doctor certifies that the patient’s health is in danger or that her economic and social circumstances are such that she should not have the baby. The Court, however, upheld the doctor’s right to refuse to grant such a certificate on grounds of freedom of conscience. The Commissioner’s cases have hence helped to clarify Polish law but have not necessarily produced the results the Commissioner or the complainants sought. It is, of course, of great importance in assessing the effectiveness of such offices as that of Ombudsman, to acknowledge that general benefits such as the clarification of the law or the improvement of administrators’ conduct, may result from the Ombudsman’s actions, even if the complainant loses his or her case.30
