Bill Implementing EU’s Digital Providers Act Vetoed By Polish President – JP

Explaining his decision, Karol Nawrocki pointed to the overly regulatory (going beyond the requirements of the EU regulation) nature of the law and the resulting risks to freedom of speech.

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main points

1 – The President of Poland vetoed the bill implementing the EU Digital Services Act (DSA).

2 –The Act allowed a government administrative authority—the President of the Office of Electronic Communications—to block “illegal content” on the Internet.

3 –Explaining his decision, Karol Nawrocki pointed to the overly regulatory (going beyond the requirements of the EU regulation) nature of the law and the resulting risks to freedom of speech.

4 –Both of these issues were previously highlighted by the Ordo Iuris Institute in its analyses of the draft bill.

On January 9, the President of the Republic of Poland Karol Nawrocki vetoed the bill amending the Act on the Provision of Services by Electronic Means and certain other acts, which was intended to align Poland’s legal framework with the European Regulation on a Single Market for Digital Services (known as DSA – the Digital Services Act).

In its numerous prior analyses of the draft bill, the Ordo Iuris Institute had advised the President to refuse to sign it. The Act indeed constitutes a textbook example of overregulation in Polish law in the course of implementing EU law. While its original version, analyzed by Ordo Iuris as early as April 2024, was indeed limited to aligning Polish law with the requirements of the EU act (not particularly far-reaching), in the course of further work on the draft bill the government of Donald Tusk added to it, as part of a so-called legislative rider, the ability to block, through administrative decisions, content posted on the Internet by ordinary users. It is worth noting that, by the time this rider was added, Poland had already missed the deadline for implementing the DSA into the Polish legal system. The government of Donald Tusk, instead of moving as soon as possible to pass a law limited to what is required by the EU, thus added extremely controversial proposals to the draft bill, which sparked widespread public opposition.

The Ordo Iuris Institute included a detailed description of the procedure for blocking “illegal content” in an analysis prepared for the purposes of a public hearing, which took place shortly after the bill was submitted to the Sejm—at the end of October 2025. This mechanism raised serious doubts from the standpoint of the constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression (Art. 54) and the right to a court (Art. 45). During the public hearing, many participating civil society organizations and ordinary citizens urged the government to completely remove from the draft the procedure for blocking illegal content. As Ordo Iuris reported at the time, the government initially, during the work of parliamentary committees on the bill, expressed a willingness to make certain changes, which were ultimately limited to a relatively narrow scope.

“If, however, the government firmly insists on the administrative procedure and does not remove the constitutionally questionable provisions from the current draft, but submits to the President a bill in wording close to the current one, and the President vetoes it, then the further delay in implementation and any penalties imposed on Poland by the EU will not be the President’s fault. Those currently in power should keep this in mind”, Jędrzej Jabłoński, the author of an Ordo Iuris Institute opinion, pointed out at the time.

Also, in another legal opinion prepared after the act was passed by the Sejm and sent to the Senate, the Ordo Iuris Institute indicated that “if the Senate does not introduce [appropriate] changes to the act (…), it should be considered justified for the President of the Republic of Poland to return the act to the Sejm for reconsideration.”

The Senate did indeed make some positive amendments to the bill, notably by entirely removing the possibility of granting content-blocking decisions immediate enforceability (which would mean that blocks could be imposed without the case being heard by a court). Still, the act in the version ultimately adopted by the Sejm (after considering the Senate’s amendments) provided for that separate, administrative procedure for blocking content on the Internet, which raised serious concerns from the standpoint of procedural safeguards and freedom of speech.

Moreover, as an argument for the veto, President Nawrocki pointed to another issue that we raised in our latest analysis — the bill provided for the possibility of awarding “trusted flaggers” grants from the state budget to fund their censorship activities, consisting of reporting “illegal content” using the internal procedures of online platforms. While the DSA provides for granting non-governmental organizations the status of “trusted entities,” it says nothing about giving them support from state authorities. The only competence the EU act grants these entities is to require large online platforms to give priority to handling complaints submitted by those entities under the aforementioned internal procedures for reporting “illegal content.”

“The President’s decision is not a surprise. The law created a special procedure, not required at all by EU law, which the government itself openly acknowledged, under which, first, on a very expedited basis, a government administrative authority could block content on the Internet, and objections to such decisions could only be reviewed later by a civil court. Is this the proper procedure for determining whether an offense has been committed? And do we not risk that the courts, in practice, would merely ‘rubber-stamp’ the administrative authority’s decisions?” — concludes Jędrzej Jabłoński, a senior analyst at the Ordo Iuris Institute.