The Political Character of Constitutional Review

in the English language: The Political Character of Constitutional Review. In this thesis, we tried to find out whether constitutional review in the Czech Republic has at least partially a political character. In the Czech Republic, constitutional review is exercised by the Constitutional Court in two types of proceedings: (a) proceedings on derogation of statutes and other regulations (laws) and (b) proceedings on constitutional complaints against decisions or other interferences of public authorities in constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights or freedoms. In proceedings on derogation of laws, we found that judicial decision-making behaviour has at least partially a political character. The reason is, in particular, that (a) judges decide in favour of proposals for derogation of laws filed by legislators (deputies or senators) of the same political affiliation as the judges' appointing president more often than when the legislator's political affiliation is the opposite; (b) ideological assessment of the analysed decisions shows that ideological aspects of the decision-making of judges significantly correlate with the presumed ideology of their appointing president. Moreover, the differences in judicial activism are smaller than the differences between legislators of opposite political..