"Żywy instrument”. Ustawa o mniejszościach z 2005 roku a ochrona tożsamości mniejszości narodowych i etnicznych w Polsce

The article refers to the interview with Danuta Berlińska from 2015, in which she spoke about the necessity of changes in the Act on National and Ethnic Minorities and Regional Language, enacted in January 2005. Its focus is an attempt to sum up the experience gathered so far with respect to the implementation of the Act. Although it still provides a sound basis for the state policy towards such groups, there have nonetheless been attempts at changing or amending it in the period of over ten years recently. These concerned the legal recognition of new groups, such as Kashubs and Silesians, as minorities, as well as the possibility to broaden the use of bilingual place names. The author tries to prove that the Minority Act should be analysed in the light of the current social conditions, not merely from the perspective of the circumstances that determined its aims and scope of application the moment it was enacted. In the contemporary discourse on the protection of national minority rights in Europe, especially as regards the evaluation of the practice of application of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities in the countries that have adopted it, it is emphasised that it has been purposefully intended as a “living instrument”.