KLÍMA, Karel a kol. Odpovědnost veřejné moci.
Prague: Metropolitan University Prague Press, 2013. 536 s. ISBN 978-80-86855-94-3
The issue of liability of public authorities is an interdisciplinary issue that involves a number of branches of social sciences, particularly the field of public law, theory of public authorities – governance, political science, sociology, social psychology, media, etc. This issue particularly resonates with the field of constitutional law, administrative law, criminal law, financial law, and other areas of public law. These individual law specializations address the issue of liability of public authorities in a partial and sometimes even marginal manner; a unifying analytical concept relating to such fields is lacking; consequently, a synthetizing summary, which would complete the facts gathered by a theoretical audit in individual spheres of public authority and its components – i. e. general state policies, functions, and activities of the public sphere, particularly state administration and concurrent local self-governments – is also lacking.
The cornerstone of the issue at hand comprises the following areas: general theory of public authorities, constitutional law, including comparative constitutional law, the research area of administrative law; and it concurrently exists in a rather fragmented view of public administration of the European Union. Therefore, a synthetic model of substantive and procedural aspects of public authorities and their main component – public administration – is lacking because it depends on constructions of theoretical inputs of a model of reference and evaluation tools that would be able to appreciate the existing system of public authority particularly in the Czech Republic and thus infer considerations de lege ferenda or de constitutione ferenda.
The essence of this analysis is based on the following theoretical premise: modern public authorities based on democratic governance must construe verifiability of the system from within. It is based on the concept of separation of public powers, which includes correction of the system of mutual breaks and balances, including correction of faulty and unlawful decisions of public authorities. Such an internal systemic verifiability of public authorities, which arises from a systemic cooperation between two or more public-law spheres, is based on interaction of mutually superordinate and subordinate authorities or procedural opponencies or on the system of solutions of disputes over competency or other disputes between public authorities, including political power, which have impact on decision-making. Modern democratic public authority must also establish procedural means of corrigibility of decisions issued in one branch by an action taken by a body in another branch. The same can be said for interaction between bodies of the state and public-law self-governments, particularly territorial.
Liability of public authorities is related to the system of separation of power. Any fault of a specific link of public authority can be discovered and rectified only by the public authority itself, i. e. by another of its links – e. g. a court may inquire into decisions made by bodies of public administration, state’s attorney office may supervise activities of the police, legal rules may be revoked due to lack of correspondence to the rule of higher legal force, officials may be dismissed due to inadequate behavior, etc. Therefore, it may be another body that is a part of another kind of public authority, in which case the systematic separation of power shall provide guarantees, or it may be another body that belongs to the same group of bodies, which is superordinate to the decision-making body.
The objective of this analysis is to provide an analytical and synthetizing elaboration of the public-law model of liability of public authorities that is based on such a system of institutional division of inner functions in which the system of relations between its inner links allows for corresponding quality of controllability of their activities, level of legality of their activities, corrigibility of errors of public administration and drawing of personal responsibility consequences. The current objective of the project is its focus on the constitutional and public-law system of the Czech Republic with opponency and critical views on its state and perspectives of its development.
