Does failure to submit an application for assessment of drought-related losses by 15 October 2026 exclude a farmer from any possible drought aid for 2026, even though the rules governing that aid have not yet been issued?
There is no direct source in the database; accordingly, I rely on the general principle of law that a public benefit, such as drought aid, may be granted only upon application and only to persons satisfying the conditions laid down in the normative act that activates the scheme. Previous drought aid programmes, including the Act of 18 December 2020 on special measures related to the occurrence of a natural disaster and subsequent “drought” statutes, made payment conditional on holding a loss assessment report prepared after the damage had been reported in the agricultural drought monitoring system application. The notice indicates that applications must be submitted by agricultural producers who applied for direct payments for 2026, and that the notification generates either a loss assessment report or a damage calculation.
That document constitutes the formal basis for any compensation. The mere finding of agricultural drought in a municipality by the IUNG monitoring system, based on the climatic water balance and soil categories, does not create a claim to payment. Such a claim arises only through the combination of notification, assessment of losses on the farm, and the statutory activation of aid.
A non-obvious point should be emphasised: the absence of a government decision on aid for 2026 does not suspend the notification deadline. The administrative deadline operates independently of whether an entitlement to the benefit will arise at all.
The practical risk is twofold. First, failure to notify by 15 October 2026 is likely to close the route to support even if the Minister of Agriculture launches a programme. In previous practice, the drought statutes required an assessment report, and a missing document could not be remedied after the deadline; aid was limited to those crops and losses that had been notified and assessed.
Secondly, merely completing the form without final signature using a Trusted Profile has no legal effect. It is important to ensure approval, because once signed, amendments are impossible, while before signature the form should be corrected so as not to entrench erroneous data on crops and acreage. For a farmer facing a discrepancy between actual losses and the IUNG monitoring result, the stronger argument is that the monitoring determines only the drought conditions in the municipality, whereas the actual amount of damage is established by an on-site assessment.
For that reason, a notification should be submitted even where the municipality’s monitoring indication is doubtful or negative, because refusal to accept a notification on that basis could be challenged as a refusal to initiate proceedings. From an institutional standpoint, the voivode and the ministry cannot grant aid ex officio, so the burden of completing the formalities rests entirely on the farmer.
Correction. The arguments of the parties to the dispute over the status of judges elected by the Sejm of the ninth term have now acquired a concrete basis: following Berek’s taking of the oath in the Sejm on 14 October 2026, supporters of the validity of the election may rely on an interpretation of Article 4(1) under which the statutory act is the taking of the oath before the President itself, including in written form, not its receipt. A refusal to receive the oath is, by contrast, an “unlawful evasion of duty” and does not prevent acquisition of the status of judge.
Pursuant to Article 4(1) of that Act, a person elected to the office of judge of the Tribunal takes an oath before the President of the Republic of Poland in the statutorily prescribed wording, and refusal to take the oath is tantamount to relinquishment of the office of judge.
Pursuant to Article 5, the judge’s service relationship is established only after the oath has been taken, and after taking it the judge must immediately report to the Tribunal, while the President of the Tribunal assigns cases to him.
The dispute concerning Maciej Berek’s oath is to be resolved not in the sphere of the President’s political discretion, but under the Act on the Status of Judges of the Constitutional Tribunal, which determines when a person becomes a judge of the Constitutional Tribunal and whether the President may refuse to receive the oath. The legal issue is whether an oath taken “before the President” requires physical presence and an act of receipt by the head of state, or whether it may be taken in another form, an issue that the Venice Commission, in its opinion of 13 October 2026, resolved in favor of written form. The second issue concerns the position of the President of the Constitutional Tribunal: whether he may make the admission of judges to adjudication conditional upon notification from the President that the oath has been received.
The provisions supplied establish the following structure of duties and competences:
Professor Sadurski’s position that the President has a “legal obligation to receive the oath” and may not examine the election procedure is not directly grounded in the cited provisions; it rests on the Venice Commission’s opinion, which is not an act of domestic law. The allegation of a “constitutional delict” against the President of the Constitutional Tribunal likewise has no basis in the cited sources.
If Berek takes the oath on 14 October 2026 in the Sejm or in written form delivered to the President, the dispute will shift to the assessment of whether there has been a “taking of the oath before the President” within the meaning of Article 4(1) of the Act on the Status of Judges of the Constitutional Tribunal. The establishment of the service relationship under Article 5, and Berek’s right to participate in adjudication and in the General Assembly, depend on that assessment. Three scenarios are of practical significance:
For citizens and the legal market, the essential point is that the validity of judgments issued by the Constitutional Tribunal depends on the adjudicating panel. Decisions issued in breach of the provisions of the Act on the Constitutional Tribunal may be subject to separate assessment under Article 19 of the Implementing Provisions.
Article 4(2) states that refusal to take the oath is tantamount to resignation from office; that sanction attaches to the elected judge, not to the head of state.
Article 5 further provides that the service relationship is established after the oath has been taken, after which the judge reports without delay to the Tribunal and the President of the Constitutional Tribunal assigns cases to him or her.
The dispute concerning the oath of office of judges of the Constitutional Tribunal is not about ceremony, but about whether the service relationship of a judge arises by virtue of election by the Sejm, or only with the participation of the President. In its opinion adopted on 9-10 October 2026 during its 148th plenary session, the Venice Commission took the view that the President may not review the election of Constitutional Tribunal judges or assess their qualifications, and that a refusal to receive the oath is unlawful. The specific legal issue is therefore whether taking the oath before the President of the Republic of Poland is a condition for acquiring the status of a Constitutional Tribunal judge, or merely a formality whose refusal by the head of state does not prevent the judge from taking office. The determination will be based on the Act on the Status of Judges of the Constitutional Tribunal (Articles 4 and 5) and on Article 194 of the Constitution, which concerns the election of judges by the Sejm; in the background there is also the Constitutional Tribunal’s judgment of 5 June 2012, case no. K 18/09, concerning the President’s powers in appointing judges.
The Act on the Status of Judges of the Constitutional Tribunal separates two distinct acts: election and the taking of the oath. Under Article 2(2), a judge of the Tribunal is elected by the Sejm and serves a nine-year term; the candidate’s qualifications, namely outstanding legal knowledge and fulfilment of the requirements for the office of judge of the Supreme Court or the Supreme Administrative Court, are assessed exclusively by the electing body, not by the President. This structure underpins the Venice Commission’s reasoning: since the statute confers on the President no power of verification and sets no time limit for “receiving” the oath, presidential inaction cannot invalidate an election made by the Sejm. In its judgment of 5 June 2012, K 18/09, the Constitutional Tribunal examined the time limit for the appointment of judges by the President of the Republic of Poland (Article 55 § 1 of the Law on the Organisation of Ordinary Courts) through the lens of Article 179 in conjunction with Articles 8(2) and 2 of the Constitution; that case law confirms that the President’s powers in the process of staffing the judiciary are subject to constitutional review and may not be interpreted expansively at the expense of the electing bodies. In practice, according to the Commission’s assessment, judges elected by the Sejm may take the oath without the President’s physical participation and begin adjudicating; the Tribunal’s internal functioning is supported by Article 18 of the implementing act, which entrusts the judge acting as President of the Constitutional Tribunal with assigning cases to judges who have taken the oath and with ensuring the conditions necessary for them to adjudicate.
For judges elected by the Sejm, the realistic scenario is to take the oath in a form that does not require the President’s presence and to assume duties under Article 5 of the Act on the Status of Judges, enabling the General Assembly to include them in adjudicating panels. For the President, the risk is an allegation of breach of the Constitution and of obligations arising under the European Convention on Human Rights; the request for the opinion was submitted on 29 June 2026 by Elvira Kovács, Chair of the Monitoring Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, so the document will feed into the monitoring of Poland’s execution of ECtHR judgments. For parties to proceedings before the Constitutional Tribunal, the key question is who is lawfully adjudicating: judgments delivered by panels including disputed judges may be challenged, and Article 19 of the implementing act, as worded in 2018, provides for a separate regime for rulings issued in breach of the statutory provisions governing the Constitutional Tribunal. The further course of the matter will depend on the response of the Chancellery of the President to the opinion; the sources do not indicate any deadline or procedure for taking it into account, so what should primarily be expected is a practical resolution: whether the elected judges will take the oath without the participation of the head of state and whether an application will be filed with the Constitutional Tribunal to resolve a competence dispute.
As of 1 November 2026, what will change is not the inverter market itself, but access to EU funding: projects using equipment from high-risk suppliers (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea) may be cut off from support from the EU budget.
An applicant for aid under the modernisation of an agricultural holding must additionally comply with the capacity limits set out in § 4(1)(2) of the “Modernisation of Agricultural Holdings” Regulation (not more than 50 kW in total, including up to 10 kW for residential buildings and not more than 20% of the capacity), and the energy storage facility must have a capacity at least equal to the product of the installation capacity in kW and the conversion factor of 0.5 (§ 9 of the Regulation).
This is not a ban on installation: Chinese inverters, which account for approximately 80% of the global market, will remain lawful, but the choice of equipment will become a condition for retaining subsidies. The legal issue concerns the eligibility of expenditure in RES projects co-financed from EU funds and the technical requirements applicable to equipment. It will be determined on the basis of technical specifications that Member States must define for RES equipment in order to benefit from support schemes, pursuant to Article 15(2) of Directive 2018/2001 (RED II), with priority given to harmonised standards published in the Official Journal of the EU. National requirements concerning project documentation apply additionally, including the Regulation of the Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development of 20 August 2024 (“Modernisation of Agricultural Holdings”), whose § 4(1b) requires the design of a photovoltaic installation to specify the technical parameters of the planned equipment, and § 13(a)(35a), which requires the design to be prepared by a certified installer within the meaning of Article 136(1) of the Act of 20 February 2015 on renewable energy sources.
The scope of obligations differs depending on the investor’s status:
Realistic market scenarios are as follows:
Whether the exclusion from the right to personal assistance of persons with disabilities over the age of 65 and persons with a support-needs indicator below 80 points, as provided for in the enacted statute, is consistent with the principle of equality under Article 32 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland and with Articles 19 and 5 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, given that both issues were expressly flagged by the Senate Legislative Office.
I rely here on a general principle of law, rather than on a direct quotation of a provision from the supplied sources. Article 32 of the Constitution of the Republic of Poland requires equal treatment of all persons in factually comparable situations, while limiting entitlement to a benefit to a selected group, here persons aged 18-65 and the 80-point threshold, requires an objective that is rational and proportionate. The UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, ratified by Poland and therefore having force under Articles 87 and 91 of the Constitution, obliges the state to ensure access to support services enabling persons to live in the community without discrimination on grounds of disability or age.
The legislature defends the boundaries of the benefit by reference to the financial capacity of the state and to a mandatory review of the statute after three years. This is a proportionality argument “over time”, the constitutional value of which is not self-evident, since the age criterion does not directly correlate with the need for support.
The supplied sources do not contain case law directly determining the constitutionality of thresholds for eligibility for care-related benefits based on a support-needs scale, so I cannot rely on a settled line of authority. It should only be noted that, in its general case law on social benefits, including judgments concerning social assistance benefits, the Constitutional Tribunal permits differentiation of entitlements having regard to public finances, but requires a genuine rational connection between the criterion and the regulatory purpose. Budgetary criteria alone cannot serve as a substitute objective of the regulation.
The reservations of the Senate Legislative Office recorded in the legislative process may have evidential significance in any proceedings before the Constitutional Tribunal, as an indication that equality-related doubts were known to the legislature at the time of the vote.
The equality-based argument against the age threshold of 65 and the point threshold of 80 points is now stronger in two respects. First, in any constitutional complaint to the Constitutional Tribunal against this statute, it will be possible to rely directly on the reservations of the Legislative Office recorded during the Senate proceedings; this is a solid evidential source showing that the constitutional concerns were known to the legislature. Secondly, in administrative decisions refusing personal assistance to persons just below the 80-point threshold or over the age of 65, the refusal should be justified consistently not only by reference to the statute, but also by an assessment of the individual need.
A decision relying solely on the excluding criterion may be challenged before the voivodeship administrative court on Convention-based grounds. The practical risk for local authorities and non-governmental organisations that begin implementing the task in 2028 is that the statute provides for maximum hourly limits, 200 in 2028, 220 in 2029, and ultimately 240, and no indexation of rates of PLN 49-55 per hour. Contracts concluded with assistants over a multi-year horizon should include an indexation mechanism, because a rate set in 2028 will decline in real terms, creating a risk of remuneration disputes and staff turnover.