We do not want to wait for years. The aim and demands of the residence-legalisation protest

The protest concerns the system and institutional accountability, not the assessment of individual office staff. The state accepts an application, collects the fee, and then leaves a person without a decision for two or three years.

We do not call for changes to the rules for granting Polish citizenship or automatically positive decisions.

Behind every case there is a person, not a file that can be put on a shelf. People cannot put their lives on hold for two or three years: they have to work, raise children, get medical treatment, run businesses, travel and plan for the future. That is why we want residence-legalisation cases in the Pomeranian Voivodeship and across Poland to be handled within a reasonable and predictable time. But the slogan “work faster” is not enough. We expect concrete measures, deadlines and data.

Our aim is:

• to stop the queue from growing and to reduce the number of unresolved cases systematically;
• to shorten the real waiting time for a decision;
• to introduce transparent rules by which anyone can check whether the situation is genuinely improving;
• to bring about organisational change in the Pomeranian Voivodeship Office, and statutory and digital change at national level.

The demands in brief

We expect:

1. a public plan to clear the backlog and comparable data — with quarterly targets, specific deadlines, monthly statistics, regular assessment of results and corrective action;
2. effective organisation and a response to every demand — assessment of staffing, actual case handling, MOS and FAMI results; coordination of related family cases, continued work after a complaint to WSA, timely handling of certificates and correspondence, an implementation schedule and a working meeting;
3. accountability of the administration and equal rules — repeal of art. 100d and fast procedures based on objective features of the case rather than nationality;
4. one coherent digital process — integration of MOS 2 with ST POBYT, EZD, voivodeship systems and state registers, without re-keying the same data by hand.

Below: 11 demands to the Voivode and PUW, and 4 nationwide demands.

Our demands to the Pomeranian Voivode and Pomorski Urząd Wojewódzki

The following 11 points summarise the petition prepared for 7 September 2026. They concern temporary residence permits, permanent residence permits and EU long-term resident permits. We want to know how many cases remain unresolved, what the office intends to achieve and by when, what it has achieved, and what it will change if it misses a target.

The demands also cover related steps, including serving decisions and issuing residence cards and certificates. Statistics, staffing information and assessments of organisational changes must concern the handling of these cases, regardless of how tasks are divided between PUW units. Statistics for the office as a whole cannot replace the requested data.

The requested data should show whether the backlog and waiting times are actually falling, whether the oldest cases are being resolved, and whether corrective measures are delivering the planned results.

1. A public plan to clear the backlog

We call for a plan specifying the starting position, deadlines for quarterly targets, responsible units and corrective action if targets are missed. While the backlog is being reduced, the number of cases completed over three-month periods should exceed the number of new applications. Once the backlog has been cleared, new applications should be handled on time.

The plan should set separate deadlines for substantially reducing and then clearing backlogs of cases older than three, two and one year, and a date for achieving these organisational standards:

• 60 days for temporary residence;
• 6 months for permanent residence and EU long-term resident permits;
• 30 days where the law provides for a shorter period, particularly cases under art. 137d and art. 166b of the ustawa o cudzoziemcachPL🌐 Translate.

The full period from receipt of an application to issuing and serving the decision must be measured and reduced, irrespective of when the statutory time limit starts. Organisational standards do not replace binding legal deadlines. For the Niebieska Karta UE, the maximum 90 days from a complete application to a decision and written notification under art. 11 ust. 1 of Directive (EU) 2021/1883 should be monitored separately. National and EU measures require separate calculations, applying the relevant rules on when time limits start and are suspended.

The starting point for measuring these organisational standards is defined below in section “3. Actual waiting times and stages of the backlog”. The full time from receipt of the application is measured separately.

2. Comparable data from 2020 onwards

We call for data for every month from January 2020 to August 2026, separately for the three permit types and covering every legal basis within each category:

• new applications and completed cases, distinguishing positive decisions, refusals, discontinuance, applications left unexamined and other outcomes;
• cases still open at the end of the month, including those older than one, two and three years.

The age of an open case should be measured from the date PUW received the application to the date of the reported case snapshot.

For the same period, we call for quarterly figures on:

• the number of staff handling proceedings or preparing draft decisions, and their posts expressed as the equivalent number of full-time posts;
• all open cases, active open cases, decisions issued and all completed cases per such full-time post.

Active cases exclude proceedings formally suspended by an order and cases where the deadline to remedy formal deficiencies has not yet expired. If shared staffing cannot reliably be allocated between categories, the office should provide an aggregate result and explain its calculation, without staff rankings or personal data. Where historical data is unavailable at the required monthly or quarterly frequency, it should provide the most detailed existing data, explain the gaps and state the month or quarter from which full reporting will begin.

3. Actual waiting times and stages of the backlog

Each month, for cases concluded by a decision, the office should publish the median full time from receipt of the application to the decision, and the time within which 90% of those cases were concluded. Applications left unexamined because formal deficiencies were not remedied should be excluded from this calculation.

Statistics should distinguish permit proceedings from service of decisions and issue of cards. We call for figures showing:

• all open cases, separately identifying formally suspended cases, those awaiting correction of deficiencies within an unexpired deadline, and the remainder;
• decisions issued but not yet served, distinguishing positive decisions from others;
• final positive decisions where the office is still awaiting payment or action by the applicant;
• final positive decisions where the conditions for issuing a card have been met but production has not been ordered;
• cards ordered but not yet ready and, for information, cards ready but not collected.

The office should define when a case counts as completed for statistical purposes and avoid adding successive stages together as a single backlog. It should also report the number of open cases in which all events required to start the time limit under art. 112a, 210 or 222d of the ustawa o cudzoziemcachPL🌐 Translate have occurred, and the time since the last such event. For decisions issued that month, it should report the share meeting the standard in point 1 when measured from that event. The organisational measure and assessment of compliance with the legal deadline should be reported separately. Where the required events have not yet occurred, the office should identify the actual reason.

For proceedings initiated before 27 April 2026, the previous provisions must be taken into account under art. 12 of the Act of 21 November 2025PL🌐 Translate, including art. 223 in conjunction with art. 210 for EU long-term resident cases.

4. Regular publication of results and corrective action

PUW should announce fixed dates for publishing reports:

• monthly: incoming applications, completed cases, their balance, the size and age of the backlog, actual processing times and the main stages;
• quarterly: delivery of the plan, staffing levels, indicators per full-time post and staffing changes, data on related family cases, FAMI progress and results, and improvements to case handling and local digital processes;
• when a target is missed: the reason, corrective action, responsible body and revised deadline.

Results should be assessed against the starting position, targets and deadlines. Every change to definitions or calculation methods should be explained so that it does not create an appearance of improvement.

Data, reports and plans covered by the publication demands should be available without separate requests, in one permanent location on the PUW website or in BIP, with an archive of earlier publications.

5. Staffing and organisational changes since 2020

We call for an annual account of changes since 2020: recruitment, vacancies, staff turnover, temporary staff assignments, training, allocation of tasks and work on the oldest cases. For every significant change, the office should state the date, expected effect, method of assessing that effect and actual result.

If staffing is insufficient, the plan should identify action within the Voivode’s powers and requests to the competent central bodies for additional funding or posts.

6. The case-handling process and local assessment of MOS

The office should describe the actual process from receipt of an application to service of the decision and ordering card production: the systems used, automatic data exchange, manual copying and checks, and where delays occur. We do not assume that PUW uses every system operating in other voivodeships.

We call for a list of significant problems, ordered by importance, identifying their cause, the responsible body, the proposed solution, deadline and measure of success. The MOS assessment should show what has become simpler, faster or less labour-intensive, and what still obstructs the work.

If no measurement was planned or pre-implementation data is missing, the office should explain why and use existing case dates, an appropriately selected sample of files and documented reports of technical problems. The analysis should describe its method and limitations. Problems with the central system should be referred to the Head of UdSC or the competent minister, with the date of referral stated.

7. The concrete results of the FAMI project

For the FAMI project supporting services for foreigners in PomorskiePL🌐 Translate, worth 12,885,333.33 zł and running from 29 April 2024 to 31 December 2029, we call for:

• approved output and outcome indicators: baseline, target and achieved values as at the date of the response;
• the number of posts actually filled that are funded or equipped through the project, distinguishing case-handling, information and technical duties;
• information on manual operations or duplicate data entry that have been eliminated, and how the effect was checked;
• measures showing the project’s impact on processing times, the backlog and the number of completed cases.

The office should explain how identified constraints in the process justified the choice of activities and how effective those activities proved. We do not question whether individual project expenses are eligible. If the operational impact has not been measured, we want to know why, how progress towards the objective was assessed and from what date, no later than the end of the project, measurement will begin.

8. Coordination of related family cases

We call for coordination of cases involving parents or guardians and children, spouses, and partners in a stable unmarried relationship, where the decision in one case affects the possibility of completing another. Different legal grounds for applying for a permit do not exclude such coordination.

Related cases should be marked in the system and, where possible, assigned to the same team, or supported by ongoing information exchange between the staff handling them. After deciding one case, the office should check without delay whether this allows another to be completed.

Where art. 168 ust. 5 of the ustawa o cudzoziemcachPL🌐 Translate applies, the family member’s case must be decided without delay after the main case. In other related cases, the organisational target is to complete a case with all required documents and no need for further fact-finding within 30 days of the decision removing the obstacle to deciding it. This target does not limit the duty to act without delay or to meet binding legal time limits.

Minor children’s cases require particular attention. A case ready for a decision must not be delayed solely to complete related cases at the same time.

Each quarter, the office should publish, without personal data, the number of cases still unresolved 30 days after a decision in another, related case, where that decision removed the obstacle to deciding them. Minor children’s cases should be identified separately within that total.

9. Continuing proceedings after a complaint to WSA

We call for a change to PUW’s published guidance and practicePL🌐 Translate of waiting for the files to return with a final court judgment. Art. 54 § 2–3 p.p.s.a.PL🌐 Translate provides for forwarding the documentation to the court and for the authority to uphold the complaint itself through autokontrola, but does not impose a general prohibition on continuing the proceedings.

Before forwarding the files, the office should prepare a complete working copy and continue the steps it can carry out. Where a step requires an original, it should identify the legal basis and the possibility of obtaining the necessary copy from the court. In III SAB/Gd 51/26PL🌐 Translate, the Voivode issued a positive decision after the complaint had been lodged and before WSA’s judgment. PUW’s guidance should explain how work can continue instead of announcing an automatic wait.

10. Timely handling of certificates and correspondence

We call for monitoring of all correspondence for which the law specifies a deadline or handling procedure, particularly:

• ponaglenia: prompt registration and, where they are subject to examination, forwarding to the higher authority with the necessary documents and PUW’s position within 7 days, under art. 37 § 4 KPA; if PUW considers that a special provision excludes this procedure, it should clearly explain how it has handled the submission and on what legal basis;
• certificates under art. 217 KPA: issue without undue delay and no later than 7 days, or a formal order refusing to issue the certificate or a certificate with the requested content, under art. 219 KPA.

Each quarter, the office should publish the number of submissions forwarded or dealt with on time and late, and the number still awaiting forwarding or handling at the end of the quarter despite expiry of the applicable deadline. The data must not identify the parties. Legal basis: Kodeks postępowania administracyjnegoPL🌐 Translate.

11. A response, implementation schedule and working meeting

We call for an unambiguous response to each demand. A refusal should identify a specific legal, organisational, technical or financial reason and an alternative way to achieve the same objective. The duty to give reasons follows from art. 13 ust. 1 of the ustawa o petycjachPL🌐 Translate.

The response should include a table of accepted, partly accepted and rejected demands, implementation deadlines and responsible units.

A working meeting between PUW, the person submitting the petition and Tu Żyjemy representatives should take place within 30 days of the response. It should be based on the petition, the response, the table of outcomes, a draft action plan with a schedule, and data collected by the meeting date. For missing data, the office should identify the gaps, explain their causes and specify how and by when it expects to fill them. Incomplete data should not delay the meeting.

The main purpose is to discuss the measures proposed by PUW to clear the backlog and shorten actual waiting times, and agree concrete actions, measurable targets, deadlines, responsible units and public monitoring of results, including the scope and date of the first report. The meeting is not for discussing individual residence cases.

The demands to the Voivode are based on the petition prepared for 7 September 2026, in its version of 7 September 2026. Links lead to sources cited in the petition.

Systemic demands addressed to the government, the Sejm, the Ministry of the Interior and Administration, the Ministry of Digital Affairs and the Office for Foreigners

The Voivode cannot change legislation alone. The demands below are therefore not formal requirements addressed to the Pomeranian Voivodeship Office. We raise them during the protest because the local queue is the result both of how the office is organised and of legislation and central systems. We expect the Voivode to take a public position and to pass these demands on to the competent ministers and parliamentary committees.

12. Repeal of art. 100d and restoration of the administration’s responsibility for issuing decisions on time

Art. 100d of the Ukraine assistance act suspends the running of time limits in cases conducted by voivodes concerning temporary residence, permanent residence and EU long-term resident status, excludes the application of the provisions on inactivity, and limits effective legal remedies against delay. In 2026 its operation was extended to 4 March 2027PL🌐 Translate.

We do not claim that art. 100d formally “does not work”. It works exactly as it was written: it stops time limits and shields the authority from the consequences of delay. It has not, however, solved the problem of the queue, nor has it speeded up proceedings. Some 460,000 cases awaiting examination in mid-2024 show that suspending time limits is no substitute for efficient administration. The provision shifts the burden of the state’s inefficiency from the office onto the person who has no decision and limited means of defence.

Our own statistics on WSA and NSA rulings already show a clear trend: the problem has not been solved but partly moved from the administration to the courts. When the office issues no decision, people file complaints about inactivity or undue delay, courts spend time and resources on hundreds of similar proceedings, and once the file has been sent to the court the office — according to its own statement — suspends further work until it is returned. As a result, overloading one part of the system creates a further burden in the judicial part, without bringing the individual any closer to a residence decision.

The Commissioner for Human RightsPL🌐 Translate has likewise pointed out that depriving foreigners of legal tools entrenches the absence of accountability for failing to act on time, and that the problem should be solved by comprehensively improving the administration and increasing its resources.

We demand that the government and the Sejm repeal art. 100d and restore real time limits, the duty to inform a party of delay, and effective protection against inactivity and undue delay. If the state needs a transitional period, it should be accompanied by a public backlog-reduction plan with quarterly targets, not by another automatic extension of the exception.

13. UD408: a fast residence procedure based on risk and case completeness

The government bill UD408PL🌐 Translate provides for tacit approval of most temporary residence cases within 60 days for nationals of selected developed third countries enjoying visa-free travel. The list of countries is to be determined by the Council of Ministers, taking into account migration risk and cooperation on security.

We support fast, simplified and secure procedures. We object, however, to the creation of a separate sixty-day queue available primarily on the basis of nationality, while a person with the same risk profile, complete documentation and a positive residence history may wait two or three years merely because they hold a different passport.

Such a mechanism creates a risk of unequal treatment by public authority on grounds of nationality. Art. 32 of the ConstitutionPL🌐 Translate guarantees everyone the right to equal treatment by public authorities. Not every differentiation between foreigners on grounds of nationality is automatically unlawful, but it must have an objective, rational and proportionate justification. In our view, an investment interest connected with the country of origin should not by itself determine who receives a decision in 60 days and who remains in a queue lasting years.

We demand that the accelerated mechanism be available regardless of nationality, on the basis of objective features of the case. It should cover at least subsequent applications for temporary residence.

Related cases of minor children and family members should also qualify for the fast track. In cases concerning permanent residence and EU long-term resident status, a real, enforceable time limit and priority should be introduced once the conditions are met and security checks are complete; the possibility of applying tacit approval in such cases should be assessed for compatibility with Polish and EU law.

If the government nevertheless retains a list of countries, it should publicly demonstrate the proportionality of such a solution, publish an assessment of its impact on the remaining queues, and provide additional resources. Speeding things up for one group must not mean an even longer wait for everyone else.

14. Implementation of the statutory demands from our petition to the Sejm

We expect further work on the solutions described in the petition submitted:

• a simplified procedure for subsequent temporary residence permits in cases with recurring facts;
• limiting requests for documents that the authority can verify itself in ZUS, the National Revenue Administration, CEIDG, the National Court Register or other public registers;
• simplifications for people continuing genuine, stable and verifiable sole-trader activity;
• a statutory link between the cases of minor children and those of their parents or guardians;
• ensuring that a person lawfully awaiting a decision can effectively demonstrate their status to public institutions and — within the limits of sectoral legislation — to regulated private entities.

15. Integration of MOS 2 with other state systems

MOS 2 should not be merely a new interface layer or an electronic folder for documents. Its purpose is to ensure the automatic exchange of data between ST POBYT, EZD, voivodeship systems and the necessary public registers, in particular ZUS, the National Revenue Administration, CEIDG and the National Court Register.

This is not about restricting the methods of submitting an application provided for by law. Whichever permitted method is used, the information should enter a common digital process and be used at every subsequent stage. Data should not be transferred manually between systems, and documents already available to the state should not be demanded from the applicant again.

A caseworker should see in a single working environment the application, the documents, the data from registers, the history of steps taken and the tasks in the case. Authorised institutions should be able to check that the digital confirmation of the applicant’s lawful residence is current.

We have already proposed automatic data exchange, the once-only principle, checking of public registers and digital confirmation of status in our letter to the Ministry of Digital Affairs and the Head of the Office for Foreigners. The result of every IT project should be measured by how far it reduces manual work and repeated requests for documents, speeds up registration and shortens the wait for a decision.

Why we are protesting now

According to the Pomeranian Voivodeship Office’s data for 2025PL🌐 Translate, in the category of temporary residence permits, including temporary residence and work, 41,206 applications were received and 31,121 cases were completed. The difference is 10,085. That difference alone does not yet allow the whole queue to be calculated, because some of the completed cases may have come from earlier years. It does show, however, why we need full data on the number of pending cases and their age, not just two aggregate figures.

In its reply of 27 July 2026 to parliamentary question no. 18089PL🌐 Translate, MSWiA reported 598 days as the average duration of temporary residence permit proceedings handled by the Pomeranian Voivode in 2026, as at 6 July 2026. This is a problematic current figure; points 1 and 3 set out the targets and how the effectiveness of action should be assessed.

According to observations by the community project Pobytrack at the end of July 2026, the full journey from submitting an application to collecting the card took 26–28 months in the Gdańsk cases it observed. These observations concern cases reported to the project. The period covers the entire journey to card collection.

The problem is nationwide. The official report of the Sejm investigative committee, paper no. 951PL🌐 Translate states that in 2023 around 617,300 applications for temporary residence, permanent residence and EU long-term resident status were submitted, while around 411,900 decisions were issued. As at the end of June 2024, around 460,000 cases were awaiting examination by voivodes. The document states plainly that the number of applications was growing faster than the number of decisions, so that more and more cases were carried over to the following year.

Our own analysis of rulings of the WSA in Gdańsk concerning inactivity and undue delay in residence cases covers, as the database stood on 24 August 2026, 388 classified rulings from 2025–2026. In 263 cases the final classified outcome was favourable to the complainant; in at least 61 source descriptions the court found a gross violation of the law, and in at least 24 cases it awarded the complainant a sum of money. Our search for rulings is not yet complete, so these figures are a lower bound, not full statistics for all cases. We do not use them to judge individual members of staff. They show the recurring nature of an organisational problem and its real consequences.

We also know that improvement is possible. The Lower Silesian Voivodeship OfficePL🌐 Translate reported that after reorganisation in 2025 the cost of judgments and compensation fell by 84.7%, the number of complaints to the WSA by 16.1%, and the backlog from 2022 and earlier was reduced to 507 cases. We do not claim that the solutions used in Wrocław can be copied mechanically in Gdańsk. We do expect the Pomeranian Voivode to explain what solutions have been applied in other offices, which of them have been analysed in Pomerania, and why no public plan with comparably measurable targets has yet been presented.

We set out a detailed comparison of official processing times, application numbers and the results of organisational change in our analysis “Pomorskie compared with Małopolska and Lower Silesia: shorter times and the effects of reorganisation”.

The Commissioner for Human Rights also drew attention to the enormous differences in staff workload between voivodeships. At the Lesser Poland Voivodeship Office in Kraków there were 73 cases per decision-issuing member of staff in 2023 and 85 in the first half of 2024. These figures do not yet prove that a single number explains all the differences in waiting times. They do show that the resources, organisation and results of Kraków, Wrocław and Gdańsk can and should be compared, instead of treating a wait of several years as inevitable.

Our demand is simple: the state has the right to examine applications thoroughly, but it has no right to leave people without a decision for years and to conceal the inefficiency of the system by suspending time limits.

Data and the state of legislative work were verified on 25 August 2026. The ruling statistics come from our own, still incomplete database of WSA and NSA rulings and have been marked as incomplete. The remaining figures link to official sources or to the public page of the petition package.