A growing number of lawyers have come to believe that there are no mechanism in international civil law to force Poland to introduce an act to restore title to real estate nationalized in Warsaw by the communist government in 1945, according to Wiesław Szczepiński, a lawyer, specializing in property restitution who is of counsel to Wardyński & Partners, who spoke at a meeting of the AmCham Real Estate Committee in May.

Szczepiński stressed several of the arguments for this view. One is that when Poland ratified European regulations governing the protection of private property, the country had already enacted the legislation under which the nationalization was carried out.

Szczepiński explained that the nationalization of private real estate under the “Warsaw Decree” was consistent with other pieces of legislation which became law at that time. Another act involved nationalization of abandoned property, and another laid down the ground rules for reconstruction of the city.

Nationalization was in line with socialist architectural principles, which advocated greater state control over city land for better architectural planning and urban development. Among all the major cities in Poland, Warsaw at that time had the lowest proportion of city-owned land, which impeded planning and development.

The Warsaw Decree was to be followed by another decree to govern the issue of compensation to owners or their heirs for loss of their property. But that decree was never published, and another act introduced in 1958 put to an end to any claims for compensation.

The manner in which the state claimed ownership of certain property in Warsaw poses legal problems down to this day. “There is one house in ul. Rozbrat,” Szczepiński mentioned, “which for some reasons Warsaw council omitted claiming ownership of. Because of that there are doubts whether this house can be legally returned to the heirs of its prewar owner, as there is no legal basis on which to determine that the house belongs to the City of Warsaw”.

The Warsaw Decree, which nationalized private property in Warsaw across the board, did give the owners of the nationalized property the right to apply for perpetual usufruct of the property they had owned. But exercise of that right poses legal problems today.

In the case of a site on ul. Szpitalna, Szczepiński noted, the owners of some properties submitted their applications before the Warsaw council actually claimed title to the property. Today, this poses the question of whether the applications were filed legally or not.

Another problem with applications for perpetual usufruct was that the Liquidation Office, a government institution charged with executing the nationalization of property, was also empowered to request that perpetual usufruct be granted to the owners of certain properties. This happened in the case of most of the property along ul. Krochmalna. The problem is that it is difficult to establish whether the motion by the Liquidation Office was legal or not, because it acted without the knowledge of the property owners. Without establishing the legal validity of such actions, there is no basis for any further enquiry into the status of the property, Szczepiński said. The Supreme Administrative Court will have to rule on that case, but so far the decision has been delayed.

Another problem is posed by properties that were nationalized and became assets of state-run companies, which were later privatized and then sold the property. This was the case of a state-owned hotel chain in Warsaw, which held several hotels that had been private property before the war. When the company was privatized, it sold off some of its hotels to be null and void, regardless of the legal circumstances under which they had been nationalized.

Similar problems arise when dealing with property that belonged to companies before the war, instead of private individuals.

Szczepiński noted that the situation with title to real estate in Warsaw is so complex that any general rule how to deal with it today can hardly be applied. Based on his experience with property claims by heirs of prewar owners, Szczepiński said that claimants should try to reach a settlement with the city, rather than clinging to the hope that they will be able to establish clear title to the property.