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The glossed ECHR judgment concerns the extension of detention in a guarded center of an Armenian family seeking international protection. The Court has found that Poland breached art. 5 par. 1 (f) of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. It has upheld its position expressed in the case of Bilalova and Others v. Poland (application no. 23685/14), that “Various international bodies, including the Council of Europe, are increasingly calling on States to expeditiously and completely cease or eradicate the immigration detention of children. The Court has found that the presence in a detention centre of a child accompanying its parents will comply with art. 5 par. 1 (f) only where the national authorities can establish that such a measure of last resort was taken after verification that no other measure involving a lesser restriction of their freedom could be implemented […]”. Therefore, the “rule of no recollection” operating in Polish legislation may be an additional test verifying the admissibility of minors’ detention in guarded centers.

The aim of this article is to present the phenomenon of constitutional priorities as an example of so-called informal constitutional change. Constitutional priorities are a form of informal (substantive) constitutional amendment. Constitutional priorities are construed as a process of determining or giving priority to certain constitutional rules (constitutional provisions) and assigning lesser importance to others. Constitutional priorities are not permanent, they are a response to emerging social and economic, as well as political issues (situational context). They follow the changing reality and have an impact on the content and understanding of the provisions of the Constitution. The “substitution” of constitutional priorities may proceed in a crawling manner, i.e. through transformation of the state (e.g. environmental protection and sustainable development) or in an immediate manner as a response to a serious threat to the state and its citizens.

The defect of secondary unconstitutionality of the law (manifest unconstitutionality) is an issue growing out of judicial practice, and its determination is a multi-stage process. In this process, the judgment of the Constitutional Tribunal performs the function of a predicate ruling (prejudykat) for the court, for which it is binding not only in the operative part of the judgement, but also in the justification. This is of particular importance for the determination of manifest unconstitutionality. What is important is not the wording of the provision affected by the defect in question, but its meaning, normative environment, purpose and legal effect. The linguistic concurrence of the juxtaposed provisions argues for secondary unconstitutionality. It is, however, a prerequisite, but not a sufficient condition for its determination by the court.

The objective of our paper is to analyse the political activity of Polish, and Slovak, women in EP elections; we aim to determine, among other things: whether gender quotas are a decisive factor for women’s electoral success, or do other factors result in an increase/decrease in the number of female candidates and the number of women MEPs? What are the particular characteristics of women representing Poland, and Slovakia, in the EP? What was their path to the EP? Which (conservative, liberal) parties are more willing to put women forward in EP elections? Poland introduced the so-called gender quotas into the electoral system, while Slovakia does not have such legal solutions in place. However, when comparing Slovakia to the situation in Poland, it can be stated that although there is a system of election quotas in Poland, its practical implementation may be purely theoretical. In percentage terms, the number of Slovak women elected to the European Parliament (except 2019) was significantly higher than in Poland, even though there is no quota system in the Slovak Republic. The success of Polish, and Slovak, women in the elections to the EP of the 9th term is the result of many factors, which include so-called electoral engineering (quotas, gender balance, first and second places on lists), electoral strategy of a party, but above all, political and social activity of the women themselves. We consider the last factor to be determinant in this respect.

Poland is a state where the elites’ strong attachment to the idea of a written constitution prevails, as evidenced by the special place held by the Government Act of 3 May 1791 in political and academic discourse. The constitutional awareness of the citizens is also growing year after year as they are increasingly reliant on the provisions of the current Constitution of 2 April 1997, seeking the protection of their rights and freedoms before the courts. However, the period between 1791 and 1997 is not a constitutional vacuum. At that time, although as many as eight Basic Laws1 were applicable on Polish lands, some of them were imposed on Poles against their will. In total, the ‘mathematical’ balance of constitutional experience, simplified to some extent, is as follows: 10 constitutional acts are attributable to a period of 206 years (counting from the adoption of the oldest until the adoption of the youngest Constitution); thus, the average lifespan of each of them is 20 years and 7 months. If we change the frame of reference and consider the period between 1791 and 2021, the average validity of the constitution on Polish lands increases to 23 years. If only the validity of individual Basic Laws is taken as a reference, the average decreases to approximately 12 years. In political practice, as discussed below, Polish constitutions were created slowly but quickly collapsed.

Na podstawie art. 12 ustawy o krajowym systemie ewidencji producentów, ewidencji gospodarstw rolnych oraz ewidencji wniosków o przyznanie płatności rolnicy, pozostający w związkach małżeńskich, ale prowadzący dwa odrębne gospodarstwa (np. rozdzielność majątkowa), nie mogli ubiegać się osobno o dopłaty, co ograniczało ich samodzielność ekonomiczną. Problem ten nabierał szczególnego znaczenia w sytuacji pozostawania przez małżonków-rolników w separacji. Mimo sygnalizowanych problemów, ustawodawca nie dokonał nowelizacji ustawy o systemie ewidencji producentów rolnych. Dopiero wyrok Trybunału Konstytucyjnego z 3 grudnia 2013 r. (sygn. akt P 40/12) otworzył drogę rolnikom-małżonkom do odrębnego umieszczenia ich w ewidencji producentów rolnych i samodzielnego ubiegania się o dopłaty.

Practical, robust and accurate calibration of RGB-D cameras using spherical objects.Estimation of the intrinsic and extrinsic parameters of the RGB and depth sensors.Experimental comparison with existing RGB-D calibration algorithms."RGB-D calibration toolbox" for MATLAB freely available on the Internet. RGB-Depth (or RGB-D) cameras are increasingly being adopted in robotic and vision applications, including mobile robot localization and mapping, gesture recognition, and at-home healthcare monitoring. As with any other sensor, calibrating RGB-D cameras is needed to increase their sensing accuracy, especially since the manufacturer's calibration parameters might change between models. In this paper, we present a novel RGB-D camera-calibration algorithm for the estimation of the full set of intrinsic and extrinsic parameters. Our method is easy to use, can be utilized with any arrangement of RGB and depth sensors, and only requires that a spherical object (e.g., a basketball) is moved in front of the camera for a few seconds. Our image-processing pipeline automatically and robustly detects the moving calibration object while rejecting noise and outliers in the image data. Our calibration method uses all the frames of the detected sphere and leverages novel analytical results on the multi-view projection of spheres to accurately estimate all the calibration parameters. Extensive numerical simulations and real-world experiments have been conducted to validate our algorithm and compare its performance with that of other state-of-the-art calibration methods. An RGB-D Calibration Toolbox for MATLAB is also made freely available for the scientific community.

Falls are the most-common causes of unintentional injury and death in older adults. Many clinics, hospitals, and health-care providers are urgently seeking accurate, low-cost, and easy-to-use technology to predict falls before they happen, e.g., by monitoring the human walking pattern (or “gait”). Despite the wide popularity of Microsoft's Kinect and the plethora of solutions for gait monitoring, no strategy has been proposed to date to allow non-expert users to calibrate the cameras, which is essential to accurately fuse the body motion observed by each camera in a single frame of reference. In this paper, we present a novel multi-Kinect calibration algorithm that has advanced features when compared to existing methods: 1) is easy to use, 2) it can be used in any generic Kinect arrangement, and 3) it provides accurate calibration. Extensive real-world experiments have been conducted to validate our algorithm and to compare its performance against other multi-Kinect calibration approaches, especially to show the improved estimate of gait parameters. Finally, a MATLAB Toolbox has been made publicly available for the entire research community.

Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer-related mortality in the world, although it can be efficiently treated if detected early. Colonoscopy is the most-commonly adopted visual screening procedure of the colon by means of a flexible tiny endoscopic camera. In an effort to promote early screening and to facilitate mastering the endoscope motion by the physician, teleoperable robotic endoscopes and wireless capsules are being developed. In order to enable precise and fast closed-loop control for these devices, the accurate 3-D position and orientation of the camera must be known. Estimating the camera ego-motion by processing the endoscopic video provides a viable solution since it does not require the adoption of external magnetic trackers during the screening procedure that can occupy the scope’s operation channel. Furthermore, and compared to SLAM or registration approaches, ego-motion estimation algorithms do not require to deal with the highly deformable (and thus highly-uncertain) global 3D map of the colon.

Accurately and pervasively monitoring the human walking pattern (or gait) is fundamental to predict falls and functional decline, which are among the leading causes of injury and death in older adults. Existing gait-monitoring devices are not routinely used in clinical practice since they lack accuracy, ease-of-use, and unobtrusiveness. We present a novel breakthrough Kinect-based robotic system to accurately monitor the human gait during normal daily-life activities. Our system combines many interesting features: it has unlimited capturing volume, it is low cost, and does not require fiducial markers on the person. We present an extensive study of its accuracy in computing fall-prediction parameters when compared to the Vicon motion-capture system.

Kinect-style (or Depth) cameras use both an RGB and a depth sensor that acquire color and per-pixel depth data (depth-map), respectively. Due to their affordable price and rich data they provide, depth cameras are being extensively used on research in assistive environments. Most of the robotic and computer-vision systems that use these Kinect-style cameras require an accurate knowledge of the camera-calibration parameters. Traditional calibration methods, e.g., those that use a checker-board pattern, cannot be straight-forwardly used to calibrate the Kinect-style cameras since the depth sensor can not distinguish patterns. Several calibration methods have emerged that try to calibrate depth cameras. In this paper, we present a comparative study of some of the most important Kinect-sytle calibration algorithms. Our work includes an implementation of these methods along with a comparison of their performance in both simulation and real-world experiments.

Simulators play an important role in robotics research as tools for testing the efficiency, safety, and robustness of new algorithms. This is of particular importance in scenarios that require robots to closely interact with humans, e.g., in medical robotics, and in assistive environments. Despite the increasing number of commercial and open-source robotic simulation tools, to the best of our knowledge, no comprehensive up-to-date survey paper has reviewed and compared their features. This survey paper presents a comprehensive and detailed overview and a comparison between the most recent and popular commercial and open-source robotic software for simulation and interfacing with real robots. A case-study is presented, showing the versatility in porting the control code from a simulation to a real robot. Finally, a detailed step-by-step documentation on software installation and usage has been made available publicly on the Internet, together with downloadable code examples.