Administrative Silence: A Polish Perspective

The chapter offers the analysis of regulations and practice concerning administrative silence in Poland. Generally, the Polish legislator uses two normative strategies for preventing and combating the pathology of inactivity or excessive duration of proceeding: (1) an urging claim, followed by an inactivity complaint to the administrative court or (2) silent consent (silent authorization or silent termination of the proceeding). If the inactivity or excessive length of the administrative body’s proceedings particularly jeopardizes the protection of citizen rights, the legislature chooses a stronger preventive measure (i.e., the silent consent, for example, as in the Construction Law and the Tax Law). Authors of the chapter highlight that silent consent seems to be increasingly applicable, replacing the urging claim model. In Poland, administrative silence ceases to be a negative phenomenon and clearly becomes an alternative to the classical model of the obligatory completion of administrative procedure.