enforcement of contact)¶

Court: Sąd Najwyższy Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej (Supreme Court of the Republic of Poland), Izba Cywilna (Civil Chamber) Form of decision: Uchwała (Resolution) on a legal question (zagadnienie prawne) referred under art. 390 § 1 of the Polish Code of Civil Procedure Case reference: III CZP 20/25 Date of resolution: 3 October 2025 Statutory framework interpreted: art. 598¹⁵ – 598²² Kodeks postępowania cywilnego (k.p.c.) – the Polish post-2011 statutory regime for enforcement of court orders on parental contact (kontakty z dzieckiem); also art. 113 of the Kodeks rodzinny i opiekuńczy (Family and Guardianship Code) defining the child's right to contact with each parent Constitutional backdrop: Trybunał Konstytucyjny, wyrok z 22 czerwca 2022 r., SK 3/20 (Trybunał Konstytucyjny case file) Primary text (PDF on Supreme Court site): III CZP 20/25, uchwała 3 października 2025 r. – sn.pl PDF Reported at / primary sources: Sąd Najwyższy – Zagadnienia prawne SN, III CZP 20/25 | Zawiślak & Partners in Law – case note, 8 October 2025 | Kaszta & Janikowska – "Karna sankcja pieniężna za alienację rodzicielską", 13 października 2025 | Kancelaria Franczak – case note, 23 października 2025 | Kancelaria FUTURUM Wrocław – case note | Rozparagrafowani.pl – contemporaneous commentary

Parties and panel¶

Strony postępowania (parties below): anonymised in line with Polish family-court practice; the resolution arose on a legal question referred from a court of second instance (sąd okręgowy) within enforcement proceedings under art. 598¹⁶ k.p.c. The names of the parents and child are not publicly confirmed in the materials consulted.
Referring court (sąd odsyłający): a Polish sąd okręgowy (regional court) acting as second instance in contact-enforcement proceedings; the specific court is not publicly confirmed in the public commentary surveyed and would need to be confirmed from the PDF text directly via the Supreme Court site.
Panel composition (skład orzekający): three-judge panel of the Izba Cywilna SN; identities of the prezes składu (presiding) and sprawozdawca (reporting judge) are not publicly confirmed in the public commentary surveyed and would need to be confirmed from the Sąd Najwyższy docket page directly.

Background¶

In Poland, since the 2011 reform of the Family Code, a parent who has the right to contact with a child (the non-custodial parent) may apply to the court for enforcement of that right where the custodial parent obstructs contact. The enforcement mechanism in art. 598¹⁵ – 598²² k.p.c. has two stages: first the court threatens a money sum payable to the entitled parent for each contact obstructed; then, on continued breach, the court orders payment. The statutory mechanism is the principal civil tool in Polish law against what practitioners and commentators call "alienacja rodzicielska" (parental alienation).

That mechanism was destabilised by the Constitutional Tribunal in wyrok z 22 czerwca 2022 r., SK 3/20 (Trybunał Konstytucyjny). The Tribunal held that art. 598¹⁶ § 1 k.p.c. is incompatible with the constitutional protection of family life insofar as it permits a financial penalty against a custodial parent where contact failure is the consequence of the child's own attitude (postawa dziecka) – the child's "will" or "wishes" to refuse contact.

The 2022 ruling generated immediate jurisprudential conflict in the regional courts: in some districts judges treated SK 3/20 as a blanket immunity for any custodial parent who could show the child "refused" contact; in others judges continued to enforce against custodial parents on the view that the child's refusal was itself the product of the custodial parent's alienating conduct (Kancelaria FUTURUM Wrocław; Kaszta & Janikowska).

In 2025 a sąd okręgowy referred the question to the Supreme Court for resolution under art. 390 § 1 k.p.c., presenting the recurring fact-pattern: the child refuses contact with the non-custodial parent, but the custodial parent's own conduct (refusal to deliver the child for handovers, hostile communications about the other parent, weaponisation of school and medical appointments to defeat scheduled time) is causally connected with the child's stated refusal.

Key facts of the referred case (zagadnienie prawne)¶

The non-custodial parent had a final court order regulating contact (postanowienie o kontaktach) under art. 113⁵ Kodeks rodzinny i opiekuńczy.
The custodial parent did not deliver the child for those contacts.
The custodial parent asserted in defence that the child refused contact and that, under SK 3/20, no financial penalty could be imposed.
Evidence in the lower court indicated that the child's refusal was at least in part the result of the custodial parent's own conduct (described in the commentary as "alienacja rodzicielska").
The sąd okręgowy referred the question whether art. 598¹⁶ § 1 k.p.c., as narrowed by SK 3/20, still permits the order to pay a sum of money in such a "mixed-cause" case.

Procedural posture¶

A reference for resolution of a legal question (uchwała składu trzech sędziów Izby Cywilnej) under art. 390 § 1 k.p.c., heard on 3 October 2025 in Warsaw. The procedural device produces a binding interpretation for the referring court and persuasive authority for the lower courts generally.

The resolution¶

The operative thesis (sentencja / teza) of the resolution reads:

"Okoliczność, że rodzic sprawujący pieczę nad dzieckiem nie wypełnia obowiązku w przedmiocie kontaktów ze względu na postawę dziecka, nie wyłącza możliwości nakazania zapłaty sumy pieniężnej na rzecz rodzica uprawnionego do kontaktów (art. 598¹⁶ § 1 k.p.c.), również wtedy, gdy postawa dziecka jest wynikiem zachowań obojga rodziców."

(in English: "The circumstance that a parent exercising care over a child fails to perform the obligation as to contact on account of the child's attitude does not exclude the possibility of ordering payment of a sum of money to the parent entitled to contact (art. 598¹⁶ § 1 of the Code of Civil Procedure), also where the child's attitude is the result of the conduct of both parents.")

(Kancelaria FUTURUM Wrocław; Kaszta & Janikowska; Zawiślak & Partners in Law)

Three propositions are extracted from the resolution by Polish practitioner commentary:

SK 3/20 is read narrowly. The Constitutional Tribunal's 2022 immunity for the custodial parent applies only where the child's refusal is genuinely autonomous and not the consequence of either parent's own conduct. Where the child's "postawa" is causally connected with the custodial parent's alienating behaviour, the financial sanction under art. 598¹⁶ § 1 k.p.c. remains available (Zawiślak & Partners in Law).
Mixed causation is sufficient. The thesis reaches further than the referring question: enforcement is permissible "również wtedy, gdy postawa dziecka jest wynikiem zachowań obojga rodziców" – also when the child's attitude is the result of the conduct of both parents. The custodial parent cannot escape liability by pointing to the non-custodial parent's contribution to the conflict; both parents' conduct is to be investigated and weighed.
The duty on the custodial parent is active. The custodial parent must actively work to overcome the child's reluctance ("aktywnie rozwiązywać problemy"); passive deference to the child's stated wishes does not satisfy the statutory duty (Rozparagrafowani.pl).

Who else was involved¶

Trybunał Konstytucyjny (Constitutional Tribunal) – the 2022 ruling SK 3/20 narrowed the enforcement statute and indirectly prompted the 2025 reference. The Supreme Court did not overrule SK 3/20 – it could not – but it construed it as narrowly as the constitutional text allows.
Ministry of Justice (Ministerstwo Sprawiedliwości) – had previously circulated draft amendments to the enforcement regime in response to SK 3/20; the substance of those amendments is not publicly confirmed from the materials surveyed.
Practitioner commentators – the resolution has been treated as a "przełom" (breakthrough) by family-law commentators (Kancelaria FUTURUM Wrocław).

Reactions and commentary¶

Kancelaria FUTURUM Wrocław characterised the resolution as a "przełom w prawie rodzinnym" – a breakthrough in family law – because it re-opens the statutory enforcement tool against alienating custodial parents that the Constitutional Tribunal had appeared to close in 2022 (Kancelaria FUTURUM Wrocław).
Kaszta & Janikowska treat the uchwała as defining "kiedy i w jakich granicach" – when and within what limits – the financial penalty against the alienating parent is admissible, framing the issue explicitly as one about "alienacja rodzicielska" (Kaszta & Janikowska).
Zawiślak & Partners in Law stress that the resolution refocuses the inquiry on the conduct of both parents – not on the child's stated wishes in the abstract – and obliges the lower courts to investigate causation rather than to accept "the child refused" as a defence on its face (Zawiślak & Partners in Law).
Kancelaria Franczak read the uchwała as the first Polish Supreme Court instrument explicitly addressed to "walka z alienacją" – the fight against alienation – within the post-2022 constitutional landscape (Kancelaria Franczak).
The resolution has been included in the Przegląd orzecznictwa Sądu Najwyższego (wrzesień-październik 2025) – the official quarterly review of significant Supreme Court decisions (Radca Prawny – Zeszyty Naukowe).

Why this case matters¶

III CZP 20/25 is the Polish entry in the European supreme-court conversation about parental alienation, and it sits at a different point on the spectrum from the Italian (Cass. 9691/2022), Spanish (STS 519/2017) and German (BVerfG 1 BvR 1076/23) decisions already in this collection.

Where the Italian and German supreme courts moved in 2021-2024 to constrain the use of "alienation" framing as a basis for severe interventions against mothers – worrying that PA framing was being used to discount domestic-violence and child-safeguarding evidence – the Polish Supreme Court moved in the opposite direction. III CZP 20/25 re-opens the statutory enforcement tool against custodial parents whose conduct contributes to a child's refusal of contact with the other parent. It does so within a constitutional landscape (SK 3/20) that had narrowed that tool sharply in 2022.

For comparative purposes three features stand out:

It is a civilian statutory-enforcement case, not a custody-transfer case. The Polish framework does not propose removal of the child from the custodial parent; it imposes a money sum payable to the entitled parent for each obstructed contact. The proportionality calculus is therefore very different from the German (Wechselmodell), Italian (casa famiglia) or US (custody-switch) cases in this collection.
It engages the child's voice carefully. The thesis does not deny that the child may genuinely refuse contact; it requires the courts to investigate why the child refuses and to weigh both parents' contribution to that refusal. This is procedurally closer to Cass. 9691/2022 than commentators often acknowledge – both decisions insist that the child's stated position must be evaluated against the actual conduct of the parents, not taken at face value.
It is a contested-jurisdiction case in the most explicit sense. The Polish political context is unusually polarised on family-law questions: parental-alienation framing has been claimed by both the post-2015 socially-conservative coalition and the post-2023 liberal coalition for different policy purposes (Kancelaria FUTURUM Wrocław). The Supreme Court's narrow statutory reading is therefore politically significant in a way that comparable Italian or German decisions are not.

For the parental-alienation discourse, III CZP 20/25 is a useful counter-example to the simple narrative that European supreme courts are uniformly retreating from PA framing. The Polish position is more textured: enforcement against alienating custodial parents remains available, but the inquiry must be honest about causation and must take the child's voice seriously without treating it as dispositive.

For honest PA advocacy, the case is a model of what statutory-enforcement reasoning can do without invoking a clinical diagnosis: there is no mention of "PAS", no expert-syndrome framework, no diagnostic label. The court reaches the conclusion that an alienating custodial parent can be sanctioned through ordinary statutory construction and causal analysis – the kind of reasoning that the English Court of Appeal called for in Re S (Parental Alienation: Cult) [2020] EWCA Civ 568 and that the English Family Court endorsed in Re Y (Experts and "Alienating Behaviour") [2026] EWFC 38.