INPRIS enters into coalitions with other non-governmental organizations for the purpose of monitoring the election and nomination process of candidates for various public positions in Poland. 

So far, we have monitored the nomination of candidates for:

• Justices of the Constitutional Court;

• The Ombudsman;

• The Chief Comissioner for Protection of Personal Data

Problems addressed

• For many public positions, the selection procedures are not fixed.

• The information about the candidates is frequently unavailable to the public until the candidate is appointed.

• The time between the nomination and appointment has in practice been extremely short (often a few days, even where the law required a longer period), which does not permit for realistic deliberation – neither of the public nor of the decision-makers.

Method

Our aim is to collect the key information about the candidate and make it publicly available in such time before the candidate is actually appointed which permits for public deliberation.

• For each type of public office, we design a questionnaire for the candidates to fill out; the questionnaire asks the candidate for the basic information such as his/her qualifications for the position and meeting of other statutory requirements.

• Apart from the questionnaire, we collect CVs of the candidates.

• We may collect other reliable materials about the candidate (e.g. in case of one candidate we used the information from the Ministry of Justice about his judicial track record).

• We publish the materials on a publicly available website in advance of the appointment.

• We organize a public hearing of the candidate/s where the press and the general public have the opportunity to ask questions to the candidate.

• We seek to attend the parliamentary hearings of the candidates.