A law student from the University of Lodz is to write a legal analysis of the investigations surrounding the Smolensk catastrophe last April, in which President Lech Kaczynski perished along with 95 other high-ranking Polish officials.

The proposed thesis is the first such reported academic work looking into the investigations surrounding the Smolensk catastrophe. Earlier, a psychological survey on the reactions to the crash was conducted by Warsaw School of Social Sciences and Humanities.

“My intention is [to write] a reliable analysis of the legal bases for the investigations into the crash of the presidential Tu-154,” Barbara Szymanska, a final-year student at Lodz University’s Department of Law and Administration told the Rzeczpospolita daily.

“After the 10 April I looked into the Chicago Convention, which was announced as being the basis for the investigations surrounding the tragedy,” Szymanska continues, adding that “I was intrigued by the fact that a clause, which states that the convention does not apply to state flights, is very clear.”

According to Barbara Szymanska, her thesis advisor at the university had encouraged students to look into the catastrophe with regards to international law, as “what we have here is a completely new situation.”

Apart from looking into the legal context in which the Chicago Convention has been applied to the investigations, the Lodz University student is also to look into a Polish-Russian mutual agreement on air traffic by military aircraft dating from 1993, as well as an analysis of the verbal agreement between Prime Ministers Tusk and Putin immediately following the crash.

Apolitical?

“We are all interested in the case,” Professor Daranowski from the Chair of International Law at Lodz University told the daily. “We try to look into new events [surrounding the investigations] independent of a political context,” he adds.

According to Prof. Daranowski, the thesis is not politically fuelled. “We are rather interested in the formal and legal analysis of the whole case,” Daranowski said, adding that the academic work is geared towards a comparison of the 1993 agreement and the Chicago Convention. (jb)