Civil rights and liberties in conditions of the COVID-19 epidemic

Abstract

Bringing up the subject of civil rights and civil liberties during the COVID-19 epidemic, to a large extent, has been caused by a willingness to verify opinions occurring in public space, which say that the Polish government in these difficult times through legislation was against fundamental civil liberties. The reaction of most governments to the spread of the Sars-CoV-2 virus was to implement appropriate legal regulations aimed at restricting or stopping the epidemic, and Polish authorities were not an exception. The following elaboration will mainly focus on discussing specific legal actions taken by the govern­ment of Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during the epidemic, which in the opinion of many experts, violated civil rights and liberties. The article also presents examples of legal regulations implemented by the Polish government, which bore the hallmarks of defective and incorrect legislation, which in consequence could undermine the principle of a democratic state ruled by law. Noticeable attempts of stopping the COVID-19 epide­mic through Polish authorities required undertaking particular legal actions. However, the way of implementing these, compatibility with present legislative principles, and the most important – violating fundamental rights and liberties are highly questionable.