Zakres bezprawności „korupcji urzędniczej” – przyjmowanie korzyści a pełnienie funkcji publicznej

Unlawful deeds referred to as active and passive bribery define the scope of penalisation of administrative corruption, namely that related to the area of public activities. The connection between a corruption activity and the public function that is performed by the person who accepts a bribe is listed in the set of characteristic features of unlawful deeds in Articles 228 and 229 of the Polish Penal Code. The controversies that existed about the interpretation of this feature, which have resulted in a gradual extending of the passive bribery notion, and consequently of the responsibility for active bribery, were supposed to be solved by the amendments to the Penal Code of 2003. The amendments covered the legal definition of the notion of “a person that performs a public function”. The broad scope of this notion has been limited by the obligation to examine, at the stage of subsumption of the specific case, whether the person performing this function has indeed accepted a benefit in connection with the performance of this function.