Jarosław Gowin is a Polish conservative politician, and currently is Poland's minister of justice. He was elected to the Senate

Senate of Poland

The Senate is the upper house of the Polish parliament, the lower house being the 'Sejm'. The history of the Polish Senate is rich in tradition and stretches back over 500 years, it was one of the first constituent bodies of a bicameral parliament in Europe and existed without hiatus until the...

 on September 25, 2005, as a candidate of the Civic Platform

Civic Platform

Civic Platform , abbreviated to PO, is a centre-right, liberal conservative political party in Poland. It has been the major coalition partner in Poland's government since the 2007 general election, with party leader Donald Tusk as Prime Minister of Poland and Bronisław Komorowski as President...

. During the 2007 Polish parliamentary elections

Polish parliamentary election, 2007

Early parliamentary elections for both houses of parliament were held in Poland on 21 October 2007 after the Sejm voted for its own dissolution on 7 September 2007. The election took place two years before the maximum tenure of four years, with the previous elections having been in September 2005...

, he was Platform's leader in the Krakow constituency after Jan Rokita

Jan Rokita

Jan Rokita is a Polish conservative politician, a member of the Sejm, the lower chamber of the Polish parliament. He was chairman of the parliamentary club of Platforma Obywatelska from 2003 to 2005....

 had decided not to run. He was elected to the Sejm

Sejm

The Sejm is the lower house of the Polish parliament. The Sejm is made up of 460 deputies, or Poseł in Polish . It is elected by universal ballot and is presided over by a speaker called the Marshal of the Sejm ....

 with 160,465 votes, which gave him second place, just behind Zbigniew Ziobro

Zbigniew Ziobro

Zbigniew Tadeusz Ziobro is a Polish politician, since October 2005 until November 2007 Minister of Justice and Public Prosecutor General. He was elected to the Sejm on September 25, 2005 in the 13th Kraków district, running on the Prawo i Sprawiedliwość list...

. Gowin has a PhD in philosophy and is the founder and dean of Krakow's Jozef Tischner Higher European School, which is named after his one-time professor and personal friend Józef Tischner

Józef Tischner

Józef Stanisław Tischner was an eminent Polish priest and philosopher. The first chaplain of the trade union, "Solidarity" , he was an exceptional moral authority and one of the most admired figures in Poland, both during and after the anti-communist uprising.Tischner was born in Stary Sącz to a...

. He is the former editor of the monthly Znak and is known to be an expert on the philosophy of John Paul II, having established the first graduate course in Poland dedicated to the field.

He is one of the first proponents of introducing school vouchers in Poland, and he believes that privatization

Privatization

Privatization is the incidence or process of transferring ownership of a business, enterprise, agency or public service from the public sector to the private sector or to private non-profit organizations...

is necessary for the improvement of Polish education standards.

External links

• - parliamentary page - includes declarations of interest, voting record, and transcripts of speeches (in Polish)
• - Personal page - includes biographical information as well as articles authored by Gowin (in Polish)