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In November 2009 Dr. Marcin Lemkowski, an advocate at Wardyński & Partners, applied to one of the regional courts for copies of two judgments (issued by the regional court and the appellate court) together with the courts’ justifications for the judgments. The rulings were relevant to support the legal argument in another case Lemkowski was litigating.

In response the regional court demanded that the advocate should show the purpose for which he wanted to use the judgments. The court stated that the judgments could be sought in either of two different forms: “processed” or “unprocessed.” Under Art. 5(2) of the Act on Access to Public Information the judgments could not be provided in unprocessed form because of a need to protect the interests of the parties. The copies could be provided in processed form, the court said, if the request demonstrated a particularly important public interest in obtaining the information, under Art. 3(1)(1) of the Act.

Advocate Lemkowski maintained his original request, arguing that there is no legal basis to require that he demonstrate a legal or factual interest in obtaining the information, because redaction of the parties’ personal data from the judgments did not qualify as “processing” the information.

The court disagreed and issued a decision in December 2009 refusing to release the judgments, finding that the request was too general to determine whether there was a strong public interest involved, as required to obtain processed information. Lemkowski appealed.

In a decision issued on 4 February 2010 (No. BM-VI-066-56/10/1), the Minister of Justice overturned the decision, holding that the mere fact that judgments contain personal data does not mean that removing identifying details constitutes processing of the content.

Lacking a statutory definition, the minister turned to a wealth of precedent from the administrative courts holding that for information to be considered “processed” it must be qualitatively new, “which generally requires painstaking analysis, calculations or statistical presentation, as well as a commitment of staff and financial resources” (judgment of Province Administrative Court in Warsaw dated 2 August 2007, Case No. II S.A./Wa 1048/07).

Following this line of precedent, the minister held that redacting the parties’ personal data from a judgment or justification is not a qualitative change resulting in creation of new information, but a simple technical operation pursuant to the request for public information, which does not change the information from raw to processed.

The decision is now legally final. What significance will it have in practice?

“This ruling allows anyone to obtain access to unpublished decisions by the state courts, which are a base of knowledge that is crucial to any practising lawyer, without explaining why the information is needed or how it will be used,” Dr Marcin Lemkowski explained. “It is irrelevant whether the information will be used for scholarly or instructional purposes, or to litigate another similar case, or merely as a form of continuing legal education. Since judgments handed down on behalf of the Republic of Poland, together with the oral justification, are public, there is no rationale to place any special restrictions on access to judgments in written form. The dispensation of justice is not the private affair of the parties but a public function. Thus all citizens should have unfettered access to judgments, which are the end result of this process.”