Constitutional Tribunal gives gminas permission to keep out hypermarkets

Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal (TK) has overruled an official complaint by President Kwasniewski concerning last year’s land-use regulation. Under the new law, in towns with less than 20,000 inhabitants any construction of a store larger than 1,000 square meters will have to be approved by the gmina council. They in turn will have to consider the opinion of neighboring gminas, taking into account the influence of the investment in the area. Thus the only “secure” constructions are those which have already managed to obtain gmina approval. “We wanted to make the decisions concerning building of big supermarkets to be public, and we wanted to give local communities the right to speak,” said Zbigniew Wawak of Christian National Union and Solidarity Election Action (ZChN- AWS), who defended the regulation in the Tribunal. According to the President the new law infringes constitutional ownership rights and is applied retroactively. Now as a result of the TK decision, Kwasniewski himself will have to sign the document. (Gazeta Wyborcza, p.20) J.K.