The Activities of the Regulatory Committee Administering the Property of the Evangelical Church of Augsburg Confession in Republic of Poland. Legal and Practical Considerations. An outline

Abstract

The regulatory committee has not coped satisfactorily with the tasks imposed by the legislator. One reason is obviously an undervaluation of (by about a hundred times) of property claims made by the Evangelical Church of Augsburg Confession. Nevertheless, strict adherence to the norms set forth in the law and ordinance of the ministry permitted a reduction of any undue claims laid by the Church, shortly after the committee was appointed, to a legally viable extent through the elimination of inadmissible petitions. Properly conducted conciliatory proceedings would have had a similar effect. What has borne heavily on the outcome of regulatory proceedings is their slow course (some cases linger on for as long as 12 years instead of expected 3 to 6 months), which is partly due to the fact that the sessions of adjudicating panels took place only once a week. One has to note that decisions made by regulatory committees, which are specially appointed state-ecclesiastical bodies, have a significant impact on commune budgets, particularly in smaller communes, and the established mode of adjudication (in practice for sued legal persons it is a single-instance process) causes possible errors to be irreparable. Further research into this issue may serve as a contribution (however modest it might be) to any work on the reprivatization bill, also applicable to natural persons.