Poland hopes Czech government will return 368 hectares of land

The current ruling Polish Law and Justice party hopes that the Czech government of Petr Fiala will be the administration to finally return 368 hectares of land to Poland, thereby ending a decades-long border dispute, the Czech News Agency reported on Thursday citing Polish daily Rzeczpospolita. Poland sees promise in resolving the dispute with the current Fiala administration, as the two governments already managed to reach an agreement on another long-standing dispute over a coal mine in Turow.

The border dispute has been going on since at least the 1950s, after a 1958 treaty left Poland short of 368.44 hectares of land. In 1992, the foreign ministers of the two countries agreed to settle the claims and a Polish-Czech commission was established to deal with the case, but no progress was made. In 2005, the Czech government offered financial compensation to Poland instead, but they rejected the offer. In 2014, the Czech authorities drew up an inventory of land intended for transfer to Poland, but later withdrew from it. In March 2021, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki reminded his Czech counterpart at the time, Andrej Babiš, of the border dispute, but received a reply that was, in Mr Morawiecki's words, "general and evasive". Now Polish MP Jaroslaw Krajewski has intervened, writing a letter to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of the Interior about the matter.