Appointive Powers of Slovak President and Their Use in Relation to Selected Constitutional Officers
Appointive Powers of Slovak President and Their Use in Relation to Selected Constitutional Officers

Summary/Abstract: Presidential powers are stipulated in Article 102 of the Slovak Constitution (no. 460/1992 Coll.). This constitutional article defines presidential powers e.g in relation to foreign policy, the National Council, the government or the judiciary. In recent years, the use of some of these powers raised several legally relevant issues. Especially, this is the case of presidential appointive powers. Hence, in the present study, an examination of concrete appointive powers of President was done. The attention was paid to relevant decisions of Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic. The results of study show that existing concept of appointive competence of the President entails application problems, as the Constitution does not explicitly state whether it is the duty of the President to exercise the appointive competence or not. In other words, the formulation of a number of powers does not give an answer whether the Constituent Assembly had an intention to place a duty on the President to exercise his powers in a particular case or to confer a right to consider whether the President will act or not. To this day, the appointive powers of the President that have been clarified by the Constitutional Court relate only to a member of the Slovak Government, Vice-Governor of the National Bank of Slovakia, the Prosecutor General and judges of the Constitutional Court. In relation to other subjects that occupy their positions based on presidential appointment, the further procedure is legally unclear. The solution to this problem will have to be adopted in decision-making activities of the Constitutional Court, or the National Council.

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