THE COMMUNICATIVE ASPECTS OF THE SETTLEMENTS OF THE PARENT – CHILD CONTACTS AFTER THE DIVORCE (POLISH CASE-LAW AND THE INDICATION TO ECHR CASE-LAW)

Abstract

The inspiration for the subsequent consideration is a strong conviction, that courts mean much more in the modern society, than just an arbiter in the disputes. They are role models in so many ways: they make legally desired standards of behavior, they give the proper meaning to the legal institutions by communicating their correct functioning, they verify in the practice the complexity and clarity of legal provisions and by its judges they can create the modern authorities to follow. There is a strong link between the role, that the domestic courts play (or should play) in the law-abiding state, and the impact they put into the society and its values, shaping the views for the young generation, through their consistent attitude in jurisprudence. Authors analyze the chosen judgments of the domestic family courts, looking for the correct legal vision of the parental authority in Polish law in the first place and for the optimal standard of exercising it by parents in practice, i.a. after the divorce. The analysis is supposed to be the part of more general consideration according to the judicial view of the family as the basic unit of society and its functioning after any kind of breakup. Authors further examine, to what extend such model of regulation in the matter fulfils the general requirements of international and European law. Those considerations have two main goals: to investigate the contribution of Polish family courts into making international standard of parental authority, and to indicate what kind of support those courts can offer to the international society in this field.