The Sex Offenders Public Registry of the Republic of Poland: Problems that Require Solutions

Abstract

The paper examines the experience of the Republic of Poland in recording and classifying convicted sexual offenders. The register is a comprehensive criminal law tool for crime prevention of sexual violent crimes. The author examines the effectiveness of the register as well as compares it to the similar practices in some Western countries. The author dwells upon the experience of one of the very few publicly available crime registries in the European Union, The Polish Public Sex Offenders Registry, which is currently functioning on the base of the Act of 13 May of 2016 on counteracting sexual crime threats. The current registry could be checked from any device from any part of the globe (which makes it similar to some US public registries). The article examines how such regulations correlate with General Data Protection Regulation of the European Parliament and if this type of crime prevention could be considered to be adequate to its task.

Keywords

• poland
• comparative studies
• criminal law
• criminal responsibility for sexual crimes
• criminology
• human rights
• publicly available registries of sexual offenders