Uredbe iz nužde hrvatskog predsjednika: mjerodavnost francuskoga javnog prava
Emergency Decrees of Croatian President: The Authority of French Public Law

Summary/Abstract: Croatian Constitutional Court by its decision of June 24, 1992 partly rejected a reqest to start proceedings, and partly terminated already started proceedings, to determine the constitutionality of some thirty emergency decrees passed by the President of Croatian Republic during the undeclared war with Serbia and Yugoslav People's Army in the second half of 1991. The Court backed its decision inter alia by the following arguments: the President has the power to pass emergency decrees without declaring first the state of emergency; presidential emergency decrees can be retroactive since Croatian Constitution does not forbid specifically their retroactivity. The Court's reasoning, which endorses a permanent coup d'etat, is very probably a corollary of the idea, which is taken for granted by some Croatian constitutional lawyers, that Croatian Constitution is modelled on the Constitution of French 5th Republic so that the sweeping powers of the French President belong also to his Croatian counterpart. The paper challenges the idea and discusses the relevance of comparative constitutional theory for Croatian constitutional pracice. The first three sections demostrate that, despite political similarities between the early years of the French 5th Republic and the Croatian Republic, the two semi-presidential systems differ in several important constitutional and legal respects so that the powers — especially emergency powers — of the French President cannot be used as a persuasive authority to interpret powers of the Croatian President. Section four indicates that if anything in the French law is authoritative in interpreting Croatian constitutional provisions on state of emergency it is the effort of the French Conseil d'etat to control, even though in a very limited way, the legality of presidential emergency decrees. The last section points but that assumptions with which Croatian Constitutional Court interprets presidential powers are more in accord with Weimar Constitution than with the Constitution of the 5th French Republic. The paper ends with the warning the unrestrained excercise of presidential powers in Croatia may lead, as it did in Mussolini's Italy and Weimar Republic, to a dictatorship.

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