Polish courts invalidate cultural grant decisions amid National Recovery Plan controversy

Warsaw's administrative courts are overturning decisions in the allocation of funds from Poland's National Recovery Plan for the cultural sector, a program with a budget of nearly 300 million zloty. The process for selecting beneficiaries for the second round, planned for 2025, has faced widespread criticism from applicants, according to Zero.pl.

Reports indicate that over 3,800 of the nearly 4,800 grant applications received zero points from expert evaluators. Court rulings from the Provincial Administrative Court in Warsaw suggest these evaluations were conducted in a manner that "violated the law." More than 50 cases have reportedly reached the court's docket, with judges citing fundamental procedural errors by the reviewers.

One case highlighted by Zero.pl involves the Komedia Theater in Warsaw, which sought funding to create a digital archive of its history. Lukasz Orłowski, the theater's deputy director for development and communication, told the outlet they intended to build a platform serving as a virtual repository of their decades-long history, digitizing and publicly sharing archival materials. However, the application was initially rejected because an expert demanded a physical original of the theater's statute, a document that has been exclusively published in an electronic official journal since 2012.

Following an appeal, the theater faced another rejection. A member of the appeals committee accused the project of inconsistency and of assigning "zero values to indicators." The court found this claim contradicted the documentation, as the theater had declared 1,020 materials for digitization. The court suggested the reviewer might have analyzed a different project or copied a justification from another case, as the review mentioned a conference the theater had not planned. The operator of the program's appeal was dismissed by the Supreme Administrative Court in early June.

Similar issues have affected the Foundation managing the Nowe Formy theater, which applied for a grant to develop a real-time performance translation system. The project aimed to create a system that recognizes actors' speech and almost instantly provides subtitles to viewers.