I am a constitutional judge, who is more?

The Constitutional Court decided that from now on, a man registered officially on the registry can give birth to children because he can keep his female womb. Fine, it’s a matter of taste and the elementary functionality of the legal system. That’s a matter for another debate.

More important than the substance of the Constitutional Court’s judgment is the form in which it was communicated to the world. It follows from it what judgments will probably be enforced in other cases by the new composition in the order of the fourth Constitutional Court.

Above all, the Constitutional Court ruled unusually quickly for its circumstances. It was decided to present the plenary in December 2023, and the finding came after five months. In the justification, it is addressed to the Chamber of Deputies that it must change some provisions of the Civil Code, the Act on Specific Health Services and the matrix within 13 months.

This is a completely absurd deadline, if only we consider that the parliamentary elections will be in October 2025 and the voting on laws realistically ends sometime in June, July 2025, and then the holidays and, above all, the election campaign. Already, only laws that are in the first reading will pass.

Didn’t the constitutional judges know that when they gave this unrealistic term? Or did the majority of constitutional judges do it because they were afraid of the new composition of the Chamber of Deputies, which might not be so inclined to their positions? Is this tactic permissible?

Even worse, they turned the debates about the new status of trans people into a pre-election issue with their precipitous deadline. In other words, they needlessly drowned themselves under the cauldron of culture wars at the most inopportune time.

And even worse is the official justification, where the Constitutional Court says that “the role of the Constitutional Court is to catalyze democratic discussion in situations where it has not yet taken place or when it has been dysfunctional for a long time. This is exactly what the Constitutional Court is doing in the case under discussion.” With this statement, a new political party entered the political arena.

In all three previous formations of the Constitutional Court, it was held that the Constitutional Court should not be the arbiter of culture wars and is not meant to promote social trends. That is the mission of the parliament, whose composition is voted on by the people in elections. The Constitutional Court should assess whether the laws adopted by their representatives are in accordance with the Constitution. That seems to be taking its toll now.

All these things show one thing: how tragic the debate about the method of selecting constitutional judges is in the Czech Republic. Those who claimed that it is primarily a value choice and therefore the Constitutional Court should not be opinionated and professionally one-dimensional were shouted down. This has happened in many ways. The fact that President Pavel is not interested in these things and succumbed to the choice of his colleagues is one thing. However, the head of state only proposes candidates.

Then there’s the Senate, which votes on them. The way he allowed himself to be intimidated by pressure and the arguments that it is only a question of expertise and not politics is the great sin of today’s government majority, led by Miloš Vystrčil, who above all wants to have peace and feet in the political heat. We have reached a stage where the majority right-wing Senate elected the most left-wing majority in the history of the Constitutional Court. The senators could still elect the left-wing progressive Jiří Přibán and the activist lawyer Uhl, and on issues of value the deputies and senators can turn off the lights in their meeting rooms.

Now it is not at all a matter of one finding of the Constitutional Court on the problems of trans people. This is the form Bax’s Constitutional Court announced to us that it decided to be the next parliamentary chamber. The finding of the Constitutional Court can be read as a program statement of the new judicial majority.