Brussels, 22/03/2011 (Agence Europe) - Going back on a decision by the late president, Lech Kaczynski, Poland's Prime Minister Donald Tusk has announced his government's intention to ratify the Charter of Fundamental Rights. In a letter published on Saturday 19 March in the daily Gazeta Wyborcza, the Polish prime minister writes: “A modern European state must not only be effective. It is also an area of freedom. For this reason, the Charter of Fundamental Rights requires rapid ratification and Poland, with the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic, is the only country that has not yet adopted it”. Warsaw had negotiated an opt-out on the Charter of Fundamental Rights in 2007 further to fears expressed by the government under Jaroslaw Kaczynski's “Right and Justice” conservative party that ratification would open the way for liberalising homosexual marriages in Poland. The government under Donald Tusk, which took over in November, found itself compelled to keep to this opt-out under pressure from the opposition headed by the former prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who threatened to block the parliamentary vote for ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, which made the Charter binding, should the law on ratification not guarantee a lasting Polish exemption with regard to the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The president of the Republic, Lech Kaczynski (who died in an air crash with the Polish delegation in Katyn last April) had right of veto on ratification of the Treaty, and he had supported this stance. (A.By./transl.jl)