Constitutional Court Act

Act No. 182/1993 Coll. on the Constitutional Court was passed by the Parliament of the Czech Republic on June 16, 1993. The new act has filled a further gap in the Czech legal order, creating the necessary conditions for complying with the letter of the Con­stitution of the Czech Republic in the sphere of the protection of constitutionality, rights and freedoms of the individual guaranteed by the Constitution and freedoms Compared with similar activities of the Constitutional Court of the former Czech and Slovak Fe­deral Republic we have to do in a more extensive standard, since the field of activities of the Constitutional Court has been extended, without taking over the instruments of the organizational order and court rulings, in the past providing for problems now solved in the interest of legal safeguards right in the Act on Constitutional Court. The author gradually follows such questions as the system of the given law, organizational structure of the Constitutional Court, general provisions for legal procedures at court, and finally the individual types of procedures. He emphasizes that the system is based on the usual models of laws on constitutional courts, on inland modifications of the civil procedure. Further it deals with the specification of the field of activities of the Constitutional Court, between its plenum and senates. Attention is focussed on the standing of the judges of the Constitutional Court too, based on the principles of independence, immunity, incompati­bility, provision of material commodities for them and the means of punitive responsibility. The paper also deals with general problems of proceedings, the author stresses some of the novel procedural features, consisting among other things, in the introduction of obligatory oral proceedings, strengthening the position of judges-reporters, who can, from now on in cases enumerated in detail, refuse to accept definitely a draft or proposal, maintaining the obligation to be represented by a legal adviser, especially in case of filing a constitutio­nal complaint. The author discusses the individual types of proceedings, emphasizing the importance or questionable character of some of the proceedings on the constitutionality and lawful character of the rulings and regulations on filing constitutional complaints and proposals by municipalities and territorial self-governing bodies and proposals by politi­cal parties to examine the lawfulness of certain decisions or cancelling them, eventually dealing with other questions collllected with their activities.