Od Służby Bezpieczeństwa do Urzędu Ochrony Państwa
Formal–legal Aspects of the Establishment of the Office for State Protection

Summary/Abstract: A statue on the Office for State Protection (Urząd Ochrony Państwa — UOP) was passed on 6 April 1990 upon a tide of transformations commenced by the Round Table debates held a year earlier. The implementation of this legal act is regarded as the date of the inauguration of shaping the special services of an independent Republic of Poland. The article attempts to describe the transformation of the communist state security organs — the Security Service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs — into a state protection service (such as the UOP). The characteristic feature of this process was its considerable dynamics, since in the course of only several months it achieved a formal conversion of the political police, which mainly combated the democratic opposition, into a social service whose domain of activity was totally different from that of its predecessor. The article called for an analysis of a process aiming at the establishment of new special services via a number of key formal–legal documents — the outcome of a sequence of political and organisational events. The sources on which the article is based are composed, first and foremost, of documents in the archives of the Institute of National Remembrance, and in particular material describing the transformation of the SB into the UOP and the verification of the functionaries, conducted in the spring of 1990. Supplementary material originates from the archive of the Chancellery of the Chairman of the Council of Ministers and legal acts pertaining to the described problem, i.a. laws, ordinances, and orders.

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