the nationality of all inhabitants of the czech provinces and ...

Decrees of the President of the Republic from the Contemporary Perspective
Nationals (No. 33/1945 Coll.). Under
this decree, Czechoslovak citizens of
German or Hungarian nationality, who
acquired German or Hungarian
citizenship pursuant to the regulations
of the foreign occupation power, lost
their Czechoslovak citizenship by law as
of August 10, 1945, unless they proved
that they had remained loyal to the
Czech Republic, never had done wrong
to the Czech and Slovak nations and
either had participated in the struggle
for liberation of the Czechoslovak
Republic or had suffered under Nazi or
Fascist terror. In this decree, the
principle of continuity of the
Czechoslovak state was applied and the
decree meant that the said persons
would retain German or Hungarian
citizenship.
In the sphere of criminal law, mention
must be made of Presidential Decree
No. 16 of June 19, 1945 on the
Punishment of Nazi criminals, Traitors
and their Accomplices and on Special
People’s Courts (No. 16/1945 Coll.).
This decree defined crimes against the
state, crimes against persons, crimes
against property, denunciation and the
terms of sentences for the crimes
perpetrated during the period of
heightened peril to the Czechoslovak
Republic, i.e. from May 21, 1938 to
October 28, 1945. Where a court had
convicted someone of a crime defined in
the decree and the circumstances of the
case did not allow for the waiver of
punishment, the court could also rule
that the convicted person would lose his
or her “civic honour” for a limited or
unlimited period of time; loss of civic
honour could entail loss of the right to
vote or be elected, disqualification from
acting as an employer or co-employer,
disqualification from acting as a press
owner, publisher or editor or
participating in any fashion in the
publication and editing of periodicals, in
other words, restrictions which would be
an inadmissible infringement of
fundamental rights in terms of the
present legal code. In accordance with
Act No. 33/1948 Coll., extending the
effect of the retribution decree and the
288
decree on people’s courts and amending
some of their provisions, this Presidential
Decree No. 16/1945 Col., as amended,
became ineffective as of December 31,
1948 and is no longer part of current
legislation and is of no significance at the
present time.
The Relationship of the Decrees to the
Legislation of the Czech Republic
The Presidential Decrees that have
remained part of the legislation of the
Czech Republic regulate issues that have
been subject to numerous legislative
changes over the past decades, and the
organisation and activities of public
institutions, as well as business and other
relationships are now governed by
completely different legal regulations.
These Decrees of the President of the
Republic, including the ones which have
become the subject of debate, fulfilled
their purpose and have not been the basis
of any legal relationships for more than
four decades and it would serve no
purpose in legal terms to investigate
whether they conflict with the present
constitutional order; on the contrary, to
do so would question the principle of
legal certainty, which is one of the
fundamental components of present-day
democratic legal systems (see the
preamble to the judgement of the
Constitutional Court on a proposal for
cancellation of Presidential Decree
No. 108 of 1945, published as
No. 55/1995 Coll.). Under the so-called
“confiscation decrees” of the President of
the Republic Nos. 12 and 108 of 1945,
confiscation took place at the moment
when the decrees came into force and
their legal effect was thereby exhausted
and they were no longer applicable; their
application only comes into question
when it is a matter of determining
whether a confiscation took place ex lege
or not, in cases where a final legal
decision has not come into force.
The Relationship of the Decrees to
International Law
According to the intertemporal rule,
facts in dispute are examined according
to the international law that was in force