Pursuant to Article 84(2) of the Constitution of the Czech Republic and Section 6 of Act No. 182/1993 Coll., on the Constitutional Court, the President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel, has submitted to the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic a request for consent to the appointment of JUDr. Lucie Dolanská Bányaiová Ph.D. and Prof. JUDr. Zdeněk Kühn, Ph.D., LL.M., S.J.D. to the office of judges of the Constitutional Court.
The candidates were selected according to the criteria announced in advance by the President on 20 March.
1.The CPR CR will contact 23 institutions (the Supreme Court, the Supreme Administrative Court, the High Courts, the Judges' Union, the Union of State Attorneys, the Union of Corporate Lawyers, the Bar Association, the Chamber of Notaries, the Institute of State and Law of the CAS, law faculties, and regional courts) with an invitation to nominate and justify possible candidates for the Constitutional Court.
2. Suitable candidates will be evaluated and then recommended by a Consultation Panel chaired by
Prof. Jan Kysely, consisting of:
JUDr. Eliška Wagnerová
JUDr. Ivana Janu
Mgr. Anna Šabatová
Doc. JUDr. Marek Antoš
Doc. JUDr. David Kosař
Mgr. Jiří Šesták
3. The Consultative Panel will meet with the President of the Republic to introduce the candidates.
4. The proposed candidates will meet with the President for a personal interview.
5. The names of the selected candidates will be submitted to the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic for approval. The appointment of constitutional judges will follow immediately after the Senate's approval.
Basic criteria for the selection and nomination of new constitutional judges
1. Diversity in terms of professional background and experience, with the usual preponderance of general court judges and academics, supplemented by other professionals.
2. Expertise is important, not only in constitutional, international and European law, but also in core areas such as civil, criminal or administrative law.
3. Another consideration is regional diversity, both in relation to life experience and the law faculties from which judges have graduated or are working.
4. It is important to have judges across generations, but also in gender balance.
5. Diversity of values and opinions is important: the court should not be composed only of conservatives, liberals and socialists, people of the right or only of the left.
6. Everything must be consistent with personal integrity and recognition by colleagues or the wider community.
Consultation panel
1. The panel is inspired by committees and commissions of experienced professionals and respected persons, particularly in the Anglo-American world, in various agendas.
2. If the Constitutional Court is to be diverse, the Consultative Panel should be as diverse in its composition: in terms of generation, experience, worldview and otherwise. The unifying feature is knowledge of what constitutional courts are for, how they function, and how they should be composed.
Medallions of members of the Consultation Panel
Prof. JUDr. Jan Kysela, Ph.D. (1974)
He graduated from the Faculty of Law of Charles University, where he also studied the doctoral programme "Theory, Philosophy and Sociology of Law".
He has been teaching at Prague Law School since 1998. In 2006 he was habilitated for the field of "Political Science" at the Faculty of Social Sciences of Charles University, and in 2017 he was appointed Professor of Constitutional Law and State Studies. Since 2011, he has been Head of the Department of Political Science and Sociology, and from 2018-2022 he was Vice Dean for Doctoral Studies.
Since 1997 he has also worked in the Senate Office as an assistant and advisor to the President of the Senate, and since 1998 as secretary of the Senate Commission on the Constitution of the Czech Republic (since 2000 of the Senate Standing Committee on the Constitution of the Czech Republic and Parliamentary Procedures).
As a student, he worked as an assistant to a Member of Parliament, in 2008-2023 he was a member of the working committee of the Legislative Council of the Government for Administrative Law, and he is still a member of the Disputes Committee of the Ministry of Education and Science, several editorial and disciplinary boards and the Scientific Council of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University.
He has contributed to commentaries on the Constitution and the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, written six books on the intersection of constitutional law, constitutional theory and political science, as well as dozens of articles.
2015 Lawyer of the Year in the Civil and Human Rights and Constitutional Law category.
JUDr. Eliška Wagnerová, Ph.D. (1948)
In addition to her legal education at the Faculty of Law, Charles University in Prague, she holds a Ph.D. in political science from the Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University in Brno.
She was a teacher in the field of comparative constitutional law at the PF UP in Olomouc and at the FSS MU in Brno.
She was the head of the authoring teams of two commentaries - the Constitutional Court Act and the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms. She was a member of several scientific councils and a substitute member of the European Commission for Democracy through Law (the so-called Venice Commission).
Her original profession is lawyer.
After returning from exile, she started as an assistant to a Constitutional Court judge.
Since 1996 she has been a judge of the Supreme Court and in 1998 she became President of the Supreme Court.
In 2002, she was appointed judge and vice-president of the Constitutional Court for 10 years.
In 2012, she was elected to the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic for 6 years, where she served as Chair of the Commission on the Constitution and Parliamentary Procedures.
JUDr. Ivana Janu (1946)
She graduated from the Faculty of Law of Charles University in 1973 and obtained her doctorate in public international law in 1974.
After November '89 she was a member of the Czech Parliament until 1993.
She participated in the work on the current Constitution of the Czech Republic of 1993 as a member of the Parliamentary Commission for the Constitution.
In 1993-2001 she was a judge and vice-president of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic.
In June 2001, she was elected by the UN General Assembly as a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY 2001-2004).
She was then appointed a judge of the Constitutional Court for the next ten years (2004-2014).
In 2014, she received the title of Lawyer of the Year in the field of civil and human rights and constitutional law.
In his public and professional activities, he focuses on constitutional law, fundamental rights, principles of democracy and the rule of law, protection of privacy, the role of the media as a "watchdog of democracy" and the transformation in Central and Eastern Europe after the fall of totalitarian regimes.
Mgr. Anna Šabatová Ph.D. (1951)
One of the main representatives of Czech dissent, imprisoned in 1971-1973 for subversion of the republic, spokesperson for Charter 77, member of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted.
After November '89, she graduated from the Charles University in Bohemia. In 2004-2008 she completed her doctoral studies at the Department of Legal Theory at the Faculty of Law of Masaryk University in Brno. In 1998 she received the United Nations Human Rights Award.
She served as Deputy Ombudsman from 2001 to 2007 and directly as Ombudsman from 2014 to 2020.
In 2008-2014 she taught at the Department of Social Work at Charles University. She was then the Chair of the Czech Helsinki Committee from 2008-2013.
He is interested in human rights (theoretically and practically) and social policy.
Mgr. Jiří Šesták Ph.D. (1956)
He graduated from the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. From 1986 to 1989 he studied dramaturgy at the DAMU in Prague. In 2012 he successfully completed his doctoral studies at the Department of Theory and Criticism and received his Ph.D.
From 1980 to 2020 he was a member of the South Bohemian Theatre (from 1989 to 1997 he was artistic director of the Drama Department, from 1994 to 1996 and from 2004 to 2014 director of the South Bohemian Theatre).
From 2012 to 2018, he was Senator for District 14 - České Budějovice, from 2016 to 2018 he was Vice-Chairman of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic, from 2010 to 2016 and again from October 2018 to September 2019 he was a representative of the City of České Budějovice for HOPB.
In 2016-2022 he was a member of the Standing Senate Commission on the Constitution of the Czech Republic and Parliamentary Procedures, which is an advisory body of the Senate for discussing and initiating amendments to the Constitution of the Czech Republic.
From 2019 to 2020, the first director of the Museum of Memory of the XXth Century in Prague.
He was a member of the Guarantee Board of the National Theatre in Prague and is still a member of the Board of the Academy of Performing Arts (AMU) in Prague.
Doc. JUDr. David Kosař LL.M. (CEU), J.S.D. (NYU) (1979)
He studied at Masaryk University, Central European University and New York University School of Law.
In the past, he served as an assistant judge of the Supreme Administrative Court and the Constitutional Court or as an appointed expert on Czech constitutional law in international investment arbitration.
He was awarded the Lawyer of the Year 2016 (in the category of Civil and Human Rights and Constitutional Law).
He is co-author of a major commentary on the European Convention on Human Rights (C. H. Beck, 2012) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (Leges, 2022). His publications focus mainly on constitutional law and theory, judicial issues and human rights law. In the field of the judiciary, he has been awarded two major European grants for research on the functioning of judicial self-government and informal institutions influencing the judiciary. These have focused on judicial selection, judicial self-government, the role of chief justices and the political foundations of judicial independence and accountability.
He is a member of the advisory committee of the European Law Institute for the development of the ELI-Mount Scopus European Standards of Judicial Independence.
He is currently the head of the Department of Constitutional Law and Political Science at the Faculty of Law of Masaryk University.
Doc. JUDr. PhDr. Marek Antoš, Ph.D., LL.M (1979)
He is currently working at the Department of Constitutional Law at the Charles University, where he also graduated from the Master's degree programme in Law and Legal Science and subsequently from the Doctoral degree programme in Public Law I (Constitutional, Public International and European Law).
He is also a graduate of the Faculty of Social Sciences, where he completed a Master's degree in Political Science. He spent two years abroad, first a one-year stay at the University of Stockholm and then in the 2012/2013 academic year he completed an LL.M. program in Comparative Constitutional Law at Central European University.
He worked at the Department of Constitutional Law first as an internal doctoral student, later as an assistant professor and associate professor, and in July 2020 he was appointed its head.
In 2006-2008 and 2014-2018 he was a member of the Academic Senate of the PF UK, since 2018 he has been the Vice Dean for Communication and IT.
His main areas of expertise are the constitutional problems of the political system and elections and electoral law, but he has also published a number of texts on other areas of constitutional law, including human rights. He has been the principal investigator of a number of grant projects, including several grants from the General Assembly of the Czech Republic, and is currently involved in research on constitutional practices in Central European countries.
He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Jurisprudence and a member of the editorial board of the journal Acta Iuridica Olomucensis (PF UP). He also serves on several scientific and disciplinary boards (PF UK, PF MU).
He has won the Best Teacher Award three times in 2019-2022 based on student evaluation results and student voting.
In addition to his academic work, he is also an Internet entrepreneur, having published his first book on the Internet in 1996, and is one of the founding generation of Internet media.
Petr Pavel
President of the Czech Republic
(Communication Department of the CPR CR/USA)
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