Abstract

Under the approaching modernization of the Polish public procurement law the principles of awarding contract should be normatively organized, primarily in order to enhance their practical role, both in the area of legislation and official supervision and control, as well as current interpretation of the law. There is also an urgent parallel need of unequivocal statutory regulation of the principles concerning: the obligational nature of tender procedures, efficiency and transparency of public procurement proceedings, and a special form of protection of interests of bidders. Moreover, it is necessary to make those principles more universally known, especially in the judiciary and the ongoing bureaucratic practice. This will undoubtedly contribute to limiting unnecessary interpretational differences with respect to many rather vague provisions of the law.

The most fundamental public procurement law principles include the principle of contractual freedom; the numerous restrictions arising from the public procurement law regime by no means erase it, but only narrow down its scope. However, certain provisions restricting its application should be improved owing to its direct significance from the qualification of the law point of view. The principle of realistic implementation of the contract and the pacta sunt servanda principle being an extension of the former, also count in practice. In turn, their tightening in the area of public procurement, justified mostly by protection of public interest and the duty to assert claims to which the contracting authority is entitled, requires better quality legal regulation, which will have to be correlated with the dispositions of new EU directives, anyway.