Międzynarodowoprawne aspekty polskich starań dotyczących szczątków ofiar rzezi wołyńskiej

Studia nad Autorytaryzmem i Totalitaryzmem 2025, t. 47, nr 4, s. 335-355.

The aim of the present text is to verify whether Polish demands to exhume and provide a civilised burial to the victims of the Volhynia slaughter may be supported by arguments referring to public international law. This slaughter was organised in the 1940s by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army with an intent to kill all persons having the Polish nationality and living in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. Their bodies were put into mass unnamed graves the precise location of which remains uncertain. The thesis of the text is that there is a great number of legal titles allowing Poland to demand respect for the bodies of the victims of the Volhynia slaughter. The conditions of the application of those legal rules may differ from each other. The author applies the method of dogmatic and formal analysis of public international law. He applies the norms of written and unwritten international law to the historical facts and the factual state of affairs as it stands nowadays. The main part of the text confronts the situation of the bodies of the victims of the Volhynia slaughter and their mass graves with several branches of public international law. They include the rules of diplomatic protection, the humanitarian law, the law of human rights and new trends of international law theory. The conclusion is that the utility for Poland of those rules is different. On the one hand the applicability of the rules of international humanitarian law should be excluded, as the victims were not participants of any conflict but the victims of mass ethnic cleansing. On the other hand a support for the Polish demands can be found in the field of human rights, although the bases is to be found in the rights of the living persons. The traditional basis of making claims namely diplomatic protection seems to be very promising. It is especially suited to a State taking directly a case of its national– a living one or a dead one. It must be stressed, however, that there is an important trend to fill up the gaps in the traditional law as applied to the treatment of the killed persons. One of those trends refers to mass graves and advocates a set of legal obligations of States with respect to them. Another trend goes as far as to extend the set of human rights so as to attach some of them to the dead people. In this sense the Polish arguments are very well founded not only in the sphere of morality and decency but also in the sphere of law.