The Lower House has voted for the new ombudsman, 251 deputies supported the candidate of the ruling Civic Platform Irena Lipowicz, her nomination has yet to be confirmed by the Upper House. Lipowicz takes over after Jan Kochanowski who died in the Smolensk crash of the presidential plane on April 10th.
In line with the Constitution the people’s rights ombudsman is appointed by the Lower House, with the consent of the Upper House for a term of five years.
Speaking in Parliament Irena Lipowicz underlined that her main priority would be the interests of elderly and disabled. According to Lipowicz failure to respect the rights of these two groups is one of the main reasons of the amount of complaints filed to Strasbourg. Known for her conservative stand on many controversial issues , such as homosexual partnerships Lipowicz pointed that such relations are still not envisaged in Polish law.
Irena Lipowicz is a professor at the Catholic Academy of Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski in Warsaw, in the years 1991-2000 she was a deputy of the Democratic and then Freedom Union. Since 2008 she is acting director of the Polish German Foundation, between the years 2000-2004 she was Poland’s ambassador to Austria, and from 2004-2008 she held the post of ambassador- representative of the foreign ministry for Polish German relations. She resigned from the post when the then ruling coalition was joined by the farmers’ Self-defence party.(ab)