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Poland Constitutional Revisions after April 1989
The Round Table Agreement brought a number of
amendments that
substantially altered the 1952 Constitution. The so-called
April
Amendments resurrected the traditional Polish
constitutional
concept of separation of powers. The legislative branch
would
again be bicameral after four decades of a single,
460-member
Sejm. The new body included a freely elected 100-member
Senate
and retained the 460-member Sejm as its lower chamber.
Power
would be distributed among the houses of parliament and
the newly
established Office of the President, which was to assume
many of
the executive powers previously held by the Council of
State. The
April Amendments provided for election of the president by
the
two houses of parliament.
In December 1989, the new parliament made several
additional,
highly symbolic amendments to the 1952 constitution to rid
the
document of Marxist terminology. The PZPR lost its special
status
when its identification as the political guiding force in
Polish
society was deleted from the constitution. The hated words
"People's Republic" would be discarded and the state's
official
name would be restored to the prewar "Republic of Poland."
Article 2 was revised to read "Supreme authority in the
Republic
of Poland is vested in the People," amending the Marxist
phrase
"the working people." The amendments of December 1989 also
wrote
into law the equality of all forms of property ownership,
the
essential first step in establishing a market economy.
Aware that piecemeal revision of the Stalinist 1952
constitution would not meet the needs of a democratic
Polish
society, in December 1989 the Sejm created a
Constitutional
Commission to write a fully democratic document untainted
by
association with Poland's communist era. The next year,
the
National Assembly (the combined Sejm and Senate)
prescribed the
procedure by which the draft would be enacted. The
document would
require approval by a two-thirds vote of both assembly
houses in
joint session, followed by a national referendum.
Theoretically,
this procedure would bolster the constitution's legitimacy
against doubts created by the dubious political
credentials of
some of its authors.
Chaired by one of the Solidarity movement's most
brilliant
intellectuals, Bronislaw Geremek, the Sejm Constitutional
Commission faced serious obstacles from the outset. The
legitimacy of the Sejm itself was at issue because the
Round
Table Agreement had allowed Solidarity to contest only 35
percent
of the Sejm seats. Claiming that its open election in 1989
made
it more representative of the popular will, the Senate
condemned
the Sejm Constitutional Commission and began working on
its own
version of a new constitution. In reality, however the
Senate was
not an accurate cross section of Polish society because it
lacked
representatives from the peasants and the political left.
Subsequent efforts to form a joint Sejm-Senate
constitutional
commission proved futile.
After his victory in the December 1990 presidential
election,
Walesa cast further doubt on the commission's activity by
challenging the credentials of the existing Sejm.
Nevertheless,
the commission continued its work and presented a fairly
complete
draft constitution by the spring of 1991. The draft was
based on
the two series of amendments passed in 1989. It also
borrowed
heavily from various Western constitutions, most notably
the
constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (West
Germany).
The draft was soon discarded, however, because of the
Sejm's
undemocratic constituency; for the same reason, the
commission as
such ceased to exist in 1991.
In the first half of 1992, attention shifted to the
so-called
Little Constitution, a document that used much of the 1991
draft
in redefining the relationship between the legislative and
executive branches of government and clarifying the
division of
power between the president and the prime minister. The
Little
Constitution was to be a compromise that would solidify as
many
democratic institutions as possible before all
constitutional
controversies could be resolved. Nevertheless, the new
document
would supersede all but a few provisions of the 1952
constitution
and provide the basis for a full constitution when
remaining
points of dispute could be resolved. Its drafts retained
the
statement that Poland was a democratic state of law guided
by
principles of social justice. Agencies such as the
Constitutional
Tribunal, the State Tribunal, and the Office of the
Commissioner
for Citizens Rights were also retained
(see Judicial System
, this
ch.).
Data as of October 1992
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