Terrorist threat in Poland – the assessment of the phenomenon and the measures of counteracting attacks in 2010–2016

Abstract

Modern terrorism is often associated with Middle East Islamic fundamentalists. This association is a result of violent terrorist attacks that have been carried out in the past few years, in various forms and according to diverse methods. As a consequence, terrorism started to be perceived as a serious problem by the public. It is also the case in Poland, where real terrorist threats occur. The paper presents a multi-faceted assessment, with respect to substantive law and statistics, of the level of terrorist threats in Poland in the years 2010–2016, regarding specific threats as well as the response of special services. The results show that the level of terrorist threat in Poland is not high, even though terrorism encompasses a whole range of crimes penalised in many legal statutes. The high efficiency of Polish special services and the Polish police in this field results from them using in an effective way legally allowed measures of counteracting terrorism.