Apolityczność czy sprawiedliwość proceduralna? Zaufanie do sądowego wymiaru sprawiedliwości na tle innych instytucji publicznych w Polsce

The courts are crucial for political power legitimization, conflict resolution as well as harmonization of law and legal cultures of the EU Member States. Important factor in all these processes presents the public trust in the judiciary and in the law application by courts. This problem is of particular importance in the former communist countries, including Poland. In the first part of this paper, in the context of several socio-legal studies, the various historical and institutional (historical experiences, social and economic reforms) and subjective (personal contacts with the system of justice) factors are debated. These factors influence the level of trust to courts and judiciary. In the next two parts, the paper analyzes the results of surveys on the opinions about courts and judiciary conducted in Poland after 1989, and the results of our in-depth survey commissioned by the Polish, National Judiciary Council, conducted in 2009. In the conlusion of the paper we are debating the trust in courts against the background of other public institutions, in the context of political independence of courts and the procedural justice implementation. Both of them – political independence courts and fulfillment of procedural justice principle – are factors crucial for modernization and liberal democratic consolidation in the contemporary Poland.