How Czechia governs itself and who guards its constitution

How the constitution was written before the state existed

The Czech constitution is dated 16 December 1992, two weeks before the country it governs came into being. The Czech National Council adopted it as constitutional act number 1 of 1993, and it took effect with the state on 1 January 1993, so the republic began with its institutional design already settled rather than improvised afterwards.

That timing shows in the document. It is short, it is organised around a clear separation of powers, and it hands the ordinary business of government to a parliamentary majority rather than to a president. It has been amended eight times since, most recently in 2013, and the amendments have touched the electoral rules, the courts and the relationship with the European Union rather than the basic architecture. One clause forbids any change to that architecture at all. Article 9 provides that the constitution may be supplemented or altered only by constitutional acts, that a change to the essential requirements of a democratic law-based state is impermissible, and that no interpretation of legal norms may be used to justify removing or endangering the foundations of a democratic state. That is an eternity clause, and it makes some constitutional amendments unconstitutional, which is a proposition the Constitutional Court has had to enforce in practice.

What the two chambers are for

The Chamber of Deputies has 200 members elected for four years by secret ballot on the principle of proportional representation, with a threshold of 5% for entry. Governments are made and unmade there, its four-year cycle sets the rhythm of Czech politics, and the president cannot dismiss a government that holds its confidence.

The Senate has 81 members elected for six years on a majority system in single-member districts, with a third of the seats renewed every two years. The two elections use opposite methods deliberately. A proportional lower house represents parties in the shares voters gave them; a majoritarian upper house elected in staggered thirds represents territory and moves slowly, and its composition can never be swept away in one election.

Elections to either chamber are held in the thirty days before the term expires. If the Chamber of Deputies is dissolved, elections follow within sixty days. Every citizen aged eighteen may vote.

How a government is made and unmade

Article 68 sets out a sequence that is unusual in its patience. The government is responsible to the Chamber of Deputies. The president appoints a prime minister, and on that person's proposal appoints the rest of the ministers. Within thirty days the new government must appear before the Chamber and ask for a vote of confidence.

If it fails, the president appoints again, by the same method, and the new government asks again. If the second attempt also fails, the third prime minister is appointed on the proposal of the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, which takes the choice out of the president's hands entirely. The design assumes deadlock is possible and provides for it three times over before anything breaks. Only after that does dissolution become available. Article 35 lets the president dissolve the Chamber if it withholds confidence from a government whose prime minister was proposed by the Speaker, if it fails to act within three months on a government bill to which the government has attached the question of confidence, if its session is interrupted for longer than is permitted, or if it is unable to form a quorum for more than three months. Dissolution is a remedy for paralysis rather than a weapon in a political argument.

What the president actually holds

The presidency is directly elected for five years, and its holder is not accountable for the exercise of the office. Election requires an absolute majority of valid votes; if no candidate reaches it, a second round follows fourteen days later between the two leading candidates. A candidate reaches the ballot through a petition signed by at least fifty thousand eligible citizens, or through nomination by twenty deputies or ten senators.

The powers listed in Article 62 are exercised without a counter-signature: appointing and dismissing the prime minister and the other ministers, accepting their resignations, convening the Chamber of Deputies, dissolving it, and appointing the judges of the Constitutional Court together with its president and vice-presidents. Article 63 lists powers that require the government's agreement, including representing the state abroad, negotiating and ratifying treaties, and command of the armed forces.

The direct mandate and the modest powers sit awkwardly together, and that tension is the standing feature of Czech presidential politics. A president elected by the whole electorate has a claim to speak for it that the constitutional text does not support, and every occupant of the office has tested where the line falls.

Who guards the constitution

The Constitutional Court is the judicial organ for the protection of constitutionality, and it sits in Brno rather than in the capital. It has fifteen judges appointed for ten years by the president with the consent of the Senate, and a judge must be a citizen of good standing, eligible for the Senate, legally qualified and at least ten years in legal practice.

Its powers under Article 87 are wide. It annuls statutes or individual provisions that conflict with the constitutional order, annuls lower legal rules that conflict with the constitutional order or with statute, hears complaints from bodies of territorial self-government against unlawful interference by the state, and hears constitutional complaints against final decisions and other interference by public authority. That last power is what makes the court part of ordinary legal life rather than an occasional referee between institutions: an individual whose constitutional rights have been infringed by a final judgment can bring the case there.

The institution has a longer history than the state. A separate Constitutional Court of Czechoslovakia was established in 1921 under the Constitutional Charter of 1920, a seven-member body with three justices appointed by the president and two each delegated from the Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court, which made it one of the earliest in Europe. The constitutions of 1948 and 1960 abolished the idea. A functioning federal court was created in February 1991, and the present Czech court began work on 15 July 1993.

How the ordinary courts are arranged

The legal system is a civil law one, grouped with the Germanic continental tradition, and the substantial areas of law are codified rather than accumulated from decided cases. Civil and criminal codes, and codes of civil, criminal and administrative procedure, are the primary material, and for legislation to be valid it must first be promulgated in the Collection of Laws under an act of 1999 that also governs the publication of every treaty binding on the country.

The ordinary courts run in four tiers: district courts, regional courts, high courts and the Supreme Court. Administrative justice sits beside them rather than under them. Specialised chambers and single judges at the regional courts hear administrative cases at first instance, and the Supreme Administrative Court is the highest body dealing exclusively with administrative law. That duality creates a problem the system solves explicitly. When it is unclear whether a dispute belongs to the civil courts or the administrative ones, or whether it belongs to a court at all rather than to an administrative agency, a special panel drawn in equal numbers from the Supreme Court and the Supreme Administrative Court decides which forum has competence. Both supreme courts sit in Brno alongside the Constitutional Court, deliberately away from the capital where the legislature, the head of state and most of the executive are located.

The Senate has one legislative power the Chamber does not. When the Chamber of Deputies is dissolved, the Senate may adopt legislative measures with conditional and temporary validity, which then have to be confirmed by the new Chamber. That power was used for the first time in 2013, during the recodification of civil law, when the new Civil Code of 2012 was about to take effect and consequential amendments could not wait for an election.

Where power sits below the state

Article 8 guarantees the self-government of territorial units, and the map of those units was redrawn once since independence. The country was divided from 2000 into thirteen regions and the capital, each with an elected regional assembly and a regional governor, with Prague's assembly and executive powers exercised by the city council and the mayor. The older structure of 73 administrative districts and four municipal districts was abandoned in an administrative reform of 1999.

Beneath the regions sit the municipalities, of which the country has a very large number for its size, because the post-communist settlement allowed villages that had been merged under the previous system to separate again. The result is a fragmented local map, with many councils responsible for populations of a few hundred people, and a continuing argument about whether to consolidate them. The argument has a clear shape: amalgamation would cut administrative cost and raise the professional capacity of the smallest offices, and it would also remove the one tier of government that a village can see, which is why every proposal to force it has failed and every workable step has been voluntary co-operation between municipalities instead.

Regions administer secondary schools, regional roads, parts of the health service and regional public transport, funded largely by transfers from the centre. They are administrative bodies rather than legislatures: a region cannot pass a law, and the same civil and criminal codes apply everywhere.

What the republic joined and what it declined

Czechia has spent its whole existence integrating westward. It was in the Visegrád Group from 1991, first as part of Czechoslovakia, joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development in 1995, the World Trade Organization on 1 January 1995, NATO on 12 March 1999, the European Union on 1 May 2004 and the Schengen area on 21 December 2007. It joined the United Nations on 19 January 1993, a fortnight after the state appeared.

One thing it has not joined is the euro. The country is treaty-bound to adopt the single currency eventually and has set no date for doing so, and the Czech koruna remains in circulation with monetary policy set by the Czech National Bank rather than in Frankfurt. That is a live political question rather than a settled one, and it recurs at every election.

Membership of the European Union has also generated the constitutional questions the courts have found hardest, because European law claims precedence over national statute while Article 9 forbids any change to the essential requirements of a democratic law-based state. Reconciling those two propositions is a continuing judicial task rather than a solved problem. Czechia: economy works through what staying outside the euro does to the economy, and Czechia: overview sets the institutions in context.