Bogusław Przywora - Böcker

One of the constitutional obligations of states is the defence of human rights. Such state activities encompass providing free pre-litigation legal aid. In search for solutions allowing to improve Polish model, the authors employed a comparative method. As a result, they analysed solutions adopted in international law, Sweden, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.Swedish law is an example of a system with a rich legislative history in the area of free legal aid and contemporary solutions based on the model of legal aid with a “discount”. The choice of Ukraine was based on the fact that its regulations are very modern, elastic and put to the ultimate test of war. The United Kingdom was chosen as an example of a country with a common law system, where pre-litigation-free legal aid has its unique form based on grant financing.In the summary of the book, the authors strive for presenting the proposal of a model of free pre-litigation legal aid for the polish legal system based on the experience of compared legal systems.

Nowadays, more and more areas of life are covered by legal regulations. It is necessary to have legal solutions that would help navigate through specific legal systems and support the exercise of rights guaranteed by the law. The proposed publication is a comprehensive study on free legal aid in terms of comparative law. It deals with theoretical and practical issues that constitute a source of knowledge about the shape of legal aid in individual countries. It is also an inspiration for entities creating and applying the law to find the optimal model of free legal aid.

The authors set the following research goals: 1) to define the concept of free legal aid, taking into consideration the standards of the Council of Europe (especially from the European Convention on Human Rights and soft law standards) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union; 2) to pinpoint solutions in the field of free legal assistance on the example of the analysed countries as Belarus, France, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United United States of America, Poland, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden.