ABSTRACT
Compared to its Central European counterparts, the Czech Constitutional Court (CzCC) represents an interesting example of a court spared from the executive capture by a populist government – or any of the previous governments that attempted to interfere in the judiciary. This chapter argues that part of this resilience comes down to selective self-constrained behaviour of the CzCC. While being a crucial actor in the democratic transition in the early 1990s, the CzCC typically left a wide margin for compliance with the political sovereign. Drawing on the JUDICON-EU data, the chapter offers both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Court’s engagement in political processes and interaction with the Parliament. It first describes the arenas where the CzCC most vigorously engaged in judicial review battles in its three decades of existence. It argues that the CzCC stepped in most actively in transitional justice, fair trial, and electoral issues. Although the scope of agendas eventually broadened, it executed significant self-constraint and often responded to social needs and preferences of the public. Next, the chapter looks into the judicial networks at CzCC. While the very first post-communist CzCC acted typically in a unanimous way, the next two generations faced problems with communication and overall fragmentation of individual judges’ preferences. Using network analysis demonstrates that individual judges of the CzCC stand quite far away from each other (apart from judges from the same background). The increased fragmentation then led to more constraint and selective position of the CzCC, which eventually helped it to raise the stakes for a potential political sovereign aiming to eliminate its powers.
