Głusi w labiryncie prawa. Sytuacja prawna głuchoniemych w polskim systemie prawnym w obszarze prawa spadkowego

Abstract

Legal exclusion is not an intrinsic, unconditioned feature or event but a contextual issue. This context is given by a legal normative provision contained in a legal act (actual or incorrectly presumed) and the specific discriminatory situation in which the addressees of that legal act find themselves as a result of that provision. The law itself can be exclusionary, and the accepted system of defining the law creates a situation of exclusion. Deaf people have been marginalised and excluded from social life since the ancient times. Although acts of universal public international law and acts of European regional systems (EU and Council of Europe) try to protect the disabled, including the deaf, the Polish legal system does have discriminatory regulations. These are provisions of inheritance law that exclude the deaf from being witnesses to a will. The article analyses these situations by looking at judicial decisions and opinions of legal commentators. It is concluded that the line of jurisprudence developed in the judicature and largely approved by legal scholars is heading in the direction of liberalising the prohibitions formulated in Article 956 of the Civil Code. At the same time, the normative prohibition of making allographic wills cannot be mitigated. These solutions existing in the Polish inheritance law seem to be firmly rooted in the tradition dating back to Roman times. Maintaining them in the current law is not a result of a desire to discriminate against the deaf but seems to stem from a desire to ensure certainty of legal transactions.

Keywords

• exclusion
• deaf
• inheritance law
• witness
• will