Parliamentary Legislation Committee voted unanimously on Thursday in favour of the lower house's opinion for the Constitutional Tribunal stating that a law guaranteeing immunity of foreign states is unconstitutional as it forces Polish courts to unconditionally reject legal action in cases regarding war crimes.
"The MPs have unanimously supported a clear standpoint for the Constitutional Tribunal; I hope this will allow Polish citizens to sue the German state for war crimes," Law and Justice's Arkadiusz Mularczyk told the journalists on Thursday.
He added that: "obviously, the Constitutional Tribunal's ruling will be crucial, but we have made an important step".
During the committee's session Mularczyk pointed out that, for years, Polish case law was "denying people access to the courts" and that "in the current stage of international law development it's impossible to lift immunity" of foreign states.
"Who else, if not Poland has the right to shape the international law. Which country suffered more than Pland during the war?" asked Mr Mularczyk.
The motion put forward by Law and Justice MPs awaits in the Constitutional Tribunal for Prosecutor General's opinion.
Mr Mularczyk is the head of the parliamentary team on assessing the compensation owed to Poland by Germany for damages caused during World War II.
On Sunday, he announced that the committee wants to publish a report on Polish war losses at the beginning of 2019.
"Experts' work is advanced and hopefully will be finished by the end of September," said Mularczyk.
He added that after publishing, the report will be later translated into foreign languages, first into English and German.
"We want to submit it for discussion at home and abroad," the PiS MP stressed.
Mularczyk declared that in the report, the experts will provide real war losses for Poland calculated in dollars. He explained that research concerns human capital.
"It is not, unfortunately, known how many Poles were killed," he pointed. There will be an assessment of what the population potential of Poland would be if not for the war victims, and also the Germanisation of about 200,000 Polish children.
"We want to determine what the population of the Republic of Poland would be today if there had not been a World War II," he emphasised.
Another important element of the research is the determination of material losses. According to the PiS MP, the team intends to estimate what Poland's economic growth would be today if it wasn't for the war.
"Forty percent of Poland was destroyed and it was rebuilt over the years to reach the pre-war level, Mularczyk emphasised. "Where would we be today if not for the war? At the level of France or Germany? While we were rebuilding our destroyed country ourselves, the Germans received aid from the Marshall Plan," he noted.
In September 2017, the parliamentary team on war reparations was set up on the initiative of the ruling Law and Justice party. It is tasked with assessing the level of damages owed to Poland by Germany for the Second World War. The team is led by a Law and Justice MP, Arkadiusz Mularczyk.
In mid-September, the Sejm's research bureau published a study saying Poland would be justified in seeking reparations from Germany for WWII damages, as the claims "haven't expired". At the same time, experts at the German Bundestag reached the opposite conclusion.
Autor: gf / Źródło: TVN24 International, PAP
Źródło zdjęcia głównego: Fakty TVN