For the media: protest over residence legalisation in Gdańsk

Key information

Date: Monday, 7 September 2026
Time: 16:30–18:00
Place: ul. Chmielna 74/76, Gdańsk, outside the Department for Foreigners of the Pomeranian Voivodeship Office
Form: a peaceful, static assembly
Status: notified under the standard procedure and published in the Gdańsk City BIP
Organiser: the grassroots initiative Tu Żyjemy
Media contact: contact@tuzyjemy.pl

Scope of the protest

The protest concerns efficient residence-permit proceedings: predictable timelines, individual assessment of every application, full document and security checks, and transparent data on how the administration performs. We do not call for changes to the rules for granting Polish citizenship or automatically positive decisions.

Who we are

Tu Żyjemy is a grassroots initiative of residents who want to act together on public matters. Residence legalisation is our first campaign, but it does not define the whole platform.

Who supports us

The protest is backed by:

Transport i Logistyka Polska (TLP) — an employers’ organisation for the transport industry;
PSPD-Gdynia — the Pomeranian Association of Road Hauliers.

Both are employers’ organisations. Delays in issuing residence cards hit their members directly: a driver without a valid document cannot take an international route, and the company cannot plan its haulage.

Why we are protesting

The protest concerns the system and institutional accountability, not the assessment of individual office staff. The state accepts an application and a fee, and then for many months or years issues no decision and presents no credible plan for clearing the backlog.

Behind the case numbers are ordinary human lives. One person cannot travel to a sick child or to a parent’s funeral, because leaving means risking not being able to return home to Poland. Another works, studies, raises children or runs a business, yet for years cannot calmly plan a trip, a change of job or the family’s future.

Waiting for years can mean:

a family separated, or being unable to visit relatives abroad;
a child left in an uncertain position, because their case depends on a parent’s unfinished one;
being unable to leave Poland and return, despite proceedings that are lawfully under way;
difficulty changing jobs or running a business;
being unable to perform duties that require travelling abroad — from drivers’ international routes, through researchers attending conferences, to staff in other sectors going on assignment — which employers feel too;
reported blocks on an account, a card or some banking services, or demands for extra verification, once the previous residence document has expired and the new card has not yet been issued;
being unable to plan study, travel and family life with any certainty.

How long does the whole path take? 26–28 months

According to the Pobytrack project, the full path from filing an application to collecting the card, in the cases it observes in Gdańsk, took 26–28 months as of late July 2026.

The other available data form a consistent picture of the same scale of waiting:

according to Pobytrack, the wait for biometrics in Gdańsk is currently about 9 months;
the Ministry of the Interior and Administration gives 598 days, about 19.7 months, as the average duration of temporary residence proceedings conducted by the Pomeranian Voivode in 2026 up to 6 July.

In practice, biometrics is the stage after which a case can move to full examination on the merits. To illustrate the scale:

about 9 months to biometrics + 598 days, i.e. about 19.7 months of proceedings = a scale of about 28–29 months

This calculation comes very close to the 26–28 months from application to card that Pobytrack observes. It is not, however, an official formula: the ministry does not explain from which event exactly the system counts the 598 days, and the two sets of figures may cover different groups of cases. What they do show is a consistent order of magnitude — a person waits around two years and several months for the whole path to end.

Official source: the ministry’s reply to parliamentary question no. 18089PL🌐 Translate

The courts confirm the scale of the problem

With proceedings running 26–28 months, some people — having first filed a reminder (ponaglenie) — decide to bring a complaint about inactivity or undue delay before the Voivodeship Administrative Court.

In Gdańsk, 99.6% of residence cases examined by the court on the merits ended in the complainant’s favour. An administrative court does not grant a residence permit. It assesses whether the office was inactive or conducted the case with undue delay. So high a share of favourable rulings shows that the problem does not come down to isolated stories or to a subjective feeling of waiting too long.

The judicial route has a paradoxical effect in Pomerania, though. Once the file has been sent to the court, the office may suspend further steps until it is returned. The practice is not the same in every voivodeship. That is why one of our demands is that the office keep a working copy of the file and continue every step that does not require the originals.

Favourable rulings are not limited to Gdańsk. We have collected and analysed over 4,000 rulings of the voivodeship administrative courts and the Supreme Administrative Court in residence cases from across Poland. Most published entries can be checked independently in the Central Database of Administrative Court Rulings; cases from the Warsaw court come from that court’s own register, are absent from that database, and are clearly marked as such on our site.

See the nationwide statistics and the rulings database

Continued: art. 100d. The data also show a clear gap between the statute in force and the case law of the courts. The Supreme Administrative Court refused to apply a further extension of the suspension of time limits, finding it incompatible with the constitutional right to a court. From October 2025, the rulings we analysed came to be dominated by a line consistent with that case law, under which art. 100d is not treated as an automatic bar to finding inactivity or undue delay. In our database, 96% of cases examined on the merits since that point ended in the complainant’s favour.

Despite this settling line of case law, art. 100d remains in the statute and is formally to apply until 4 March 2027. This means the courts are restoring protection against inactivity in individual cases, while the legislature keeps in force a provision meant to remove that protection.

How art. 100d works and what follows from the court’s rulings

A certificate: 7 days, not months. The delays are not confined to residence decisions. A certificate confirming the date an application was filed, the case number, or the fact that proceedings are still pending, should be issued without undue delay and no later than within 7 days. If the office cannot issue a document with the content requested, it should formally refuse rather than stay silent for weeks or months. Not having the certificate can in practice make it harder to deal with a bank, the social insurance institution or the municipal office.

Legal basis: art. 217 § 3 and art. 219 of the Code of Administrative Procedure.

What to do when the office fails to issue a certificate on time →

472 → 273 days — the change in Wrocław

The official average duration of proceedings in Lower Silesia fell from 472 days in 2024 to 273 days in 2025. The Lower Silesian Voivodeship Office also reported an 84.7% drop in the cost of judgments and compensation, a 16.1% fall in the number of complaints to the court, and a reduction of the backlog from 2022 and earlier to 507 cases.

Source: Lower Silesian Voivodeship OfficePL🌐 Translate

Pomerania compared with Lesser Poland and Lower Silesia

In 2025, Lesser Poland and Lower Silesia received more temporary residence applications than Pomerania and still achieved shorter official average times. That does not mean one solution can simply be transferred from one office to another. It does show that the number of applications alone does not explain the whole difference, and that how work is organised, what resources exist, how it is supervised and how the oldest cases are handled all matter.

See the comparison of Pomerania, Lesser Poland and Lower Silesia

The main directions of change

1. An official plan and open data

An official, publicly available backlog-reduction plan presented by the Pomeranian Voivode, with concrete deadlines and monthly targets. Full information on the number, age and processing time of cases, and regular publication of real waiting times.

2. Efficient organisation of proceedings

Adequate staffing, an account of what the FAMI project achieved, carrying out administrative steps without delay once an application is registered, beginning examination on the merits without a further wait once the required conditions are met, stating a realistic date for concluding the case when asking for formal defects to be remedied, coordinating the cases of members of one family, continuing whatever work is possible after the file has gone to the court, and handling formal correspondence on time.

3. Accountability of the administration and an efficient digital process

Repeal of art. 100d and restoration of the administration’s responsibility for issuing decisions on time, fast procedures based on objective features of the case rather than nationality, simplifications for recurring and family cases, and integration of MOS 2 with ST POBYT, EZD, voivodeship systems and state registers.

Read the full 15 demands, with reasoning

What we did before the protest

The protest is the next stage in the work of the Tu Żyjemy initiative. On 24 June 2026, having collected over 3,700 signatures online, we submitted a package of three documents: a petition to the Sejm, a petition to the Pomeranian Voivode and a letter to the Minister of Digital Affairs and the Head of the Office for Foreigners.

Alongside this we are building a public knowledge base. We analysed over 4,000 rulings of the administrative courts in residence cases. The analysis showed a clear change in practice: from October 2025 a line came to dominate under which art. 100d does not automatically bar a finding of inactivity or undue delay. In our database, 96% of cases examined on the merits since that point ended in the complainant’s favour.

We also analyse how residence legalisation works across the voivodeships and publish institutional responses, guides and ready-made letter templates for offices and courts — among them reminders, complaints to the court and applications for a certificate.

See the history of what we have done →

Materials and sources

Media contact

E-mail: contact@tuzyjemy.pl

Phone: +48 730 927 292

Interviews with organisers and participants will be possible on site. To arrange something beforehand, please get in touch by e-mail or phone.

Materials as at 28 August 2026.