Problematyka stwierdzenia nieważności orzeczeń Wojskowych Sądów Rejonowych w praktyce funkcjonowania Oddziału Instytutu Pamięci Narodowej w Białymstoku
The Problems of Decisions Annulment of Military District Courts in the Practice of Functioning of the Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance in Białystok

Summary/Abstract: The subject of this article is the activity of the Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation (CNDP), located in the Bialystok Branch of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN), in the area of annulling the rulings of Military District Courts (MDC). It presents the tasks of the Commission and the legal acts regulating the procedure of invalidating the rulings of MDCs functioning in People's Poland in the years 1946–1955. The following part enumerates and discusses the structure and competences of the MDCs, with particular emphasis on the one functioning in Bialystok. Thanks to the available prosecution files of the IPN and the source materials from the IPN Archives in Bialystok, the author could present examples of three different rulings issued by the MDC in Bialystok. The cases were analyzed and their course of action during the years of the MDCs operation was shown. It was pointed out that in two cases, the rulings of the MDC were overturned by the Bialystok Regional Court primarily because they were based not on the provisions of the existing law, but on the communist ideology. The last presented case is an example that, according to the court's assessment, there were no grounds for overturning a ruling made during the Stalinist period. The author used the available lists of criminal cases from 1991–2007 and the internal statistics of the Bialystok District Court conducted after 2007, to present the scale associated with the annulment of judgments of MDCs. The number of annulled rulings of the Bialystok MDC was also analyzed in relation to the rejected applications that had no grounds for consideration in favor of convicts in 1946–1955.

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