The President of the Czech Republic vetoed an amendment to the law on salary increases for top politicians or judges

The President of the Republic, Petr Pavel, exercised his powers under Article 50(1) of the Constitution of the Czech Republic and returned to the Parliament of the Czech Republic the Act amending Act No. 236/1995 Coll., on the salary and other benefits related to the performance of the duties of public officials and certain state bodies and judges and Members of the European Parliament, as amended, and certain other acts.

The President of the Republic wrote a letter to the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies in which he justified his decision (here PDF document):

Madam Speaker,

You have forwarded to me for signature the Act amending Act No. 236/1995 Coll., on the salary and other benefits related to the performance of the duties of public officials and certain state bodies and judges and members of the European Parliament, as amended, and certain other acts. Pursuant to Article 50(1) of Constitutional Act No 1/1993 Coll., the Constitution of the Czech Republic, I am returning this Act to Parliament for the following reasons:

First of all, I do not agree with the way the legislator has dealt with the Constitutional Court's ruling, to which the adopted law is supposed to respond, especially in connection with the setting of the salary base for judges for 2025, which could again contradict the Constitutional Court's case law and trigger further court disputes with judges. Given the late adoption of the law, its undesirable retroactivity cannot be overlooked.

The currently adopted legislation on the salaries of constitutional officials again fails to address the problem in a systemic manner. The "permanent" mechanism established years ago is constantly being modified and is repeatedly, and to a large extent randomly and unsystematically, interfered with almost every year.

The currently adopted law proposed by the ruling coalition is to a large extent once again only a "transitional solution" for the duration of the election year and does not address the undesirable opening of the scissors between the judicial power on the one hand and the legislative and executive powers on the other, but rather aims to deepen this situation. This trend has been further reinforced by the amendments that were implemented in the originally submitted draft law during its discussion in the Chamber of Deputies.

Similarly, I see as a bad solution the proposals put forward by the parliamentary opposition to completely freeze the salaries of representatives of the legislative and executive branches, or the idea of completely separating the salaries of judges from the salaries of other representatives of state power.

If all state power is to be truly exercised in the public interest, as is implied by our Constitution, I consider it desirable that the representatives of the legislative and executive powers should also be adequately remunerated. Indeed, in its earlier case law, the Constitutional Court has also referred to the principle of separation of powers in the sense of the mutual balance of legislative, executive and judicial powers, including in the area of salaries; the balance cannot therefore be argued in favour of one group of constitutional officials alone.

I believe that we need to get to a state of automatically adjusted salaries according to clearly defined criteria. That is to say, a state where politicians honour the automatic mechanism set up and do not repeatedly set their own salaries, populistically freeze them or otherwise adjust them ad hoc, even in an election year.

I see a desirable consequence of such an arrangement as the fact that judges would not then decide their own salaries through the Constitutional Court, as has happened repeatedly.

The aim should be a legal regulation according to which the salaries of constitutional officials would be dependent only on the performance of the economy and the salary and wage level in the whole society in the long term, thus permanently maintaining the proportions between the salaries of judges and other constitutional officials. For all these reasons, I have decided to return the law to Parliament.

Yours sincerely

Petr Pavel

castle.cz/ gnews.cz - RoZ

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