Current challenges of sources of law in the Slovak Republic

The article gives a comprehensive overview of the issues of sources of law in the Slovak Republic. It describes the different types of sources of law of Slovak Republic and their constitutional and legal regulation and also focuses on the analysis of the critical moments of constitutional and legislative process. The text explains the basic form of the national legal system, which in the traditional terms takes the form of a pyramid, the top of which are the Constitution and constitutional acts. This traditional concept is confronted with the current development of relations of the systems of international law, European law and national law, on the background of the theory of inter – system legal pluralism. The article is focused on the definition of the status of international treaties in the legal order of the Slovak Republic, with particular emphasis on the status of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (European Convention on Human Rights) and the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms of the European Union. For this purpose the relevant case-law of the Constitutional Court of the Slovak Republic is demonstrated, and the issue of the concept of the relationship between the national law of the Slovak Republic and the European Union is raised. The unspoken material core of the Constitution of the Slovak Republic is to be considered as a criterion of recognition of the principle of the primacy of European Union law.

Legal Protection of Cultural Assets – Terminological Problems

In article the author occupies herself with the issue of the lack of any uniform or precise terminology in the normative regulation in a such specific domain as the legal protection of the cultural goods. By creating the protection mechanisms for the widely defined cultural goods in the Constitution and the other legal acts the lawmaker used several different terms to define similar fields of legal norms’ usage. The research based on the Constitution and located on the ground of the law that specifies preservation and caretaking of historic monuments enabled the author to perceive some fallacies, that can even be called shortages, in the same field, as the polish law is considered as well as its relation to the international law. In the first part of the article the author presents terminology that is being used in the sphere of the legal protection of cultural goods in the international law. Afterwards she considers the terminology used for defining the same field in the Polish Constitution. In the next part of her thesis she introduces the terminology employed on the ground of polish law pointing out that the legislator uses numerous legal terms for the same field. This leads her to the conclusion about the lack of terminological discipline showed by the legislator, which effects, as she sees it, in the attenuation of the legal protection and even in developing of the legal gap.

Selected issues on the process of the implementation of the  European Union directives into the national law of the Republic of Poland

The aim of this paper is to presents selected issues on the process of the implementation of the EU directives into the national law of the Republic of Poland. This issue is very important as the most of the legislative process, especially connected with economic issues, is currently held at the level of the European Union. Legal acts, which are adopted in Poland, aim to implement the EU law into the national law. Therefore, there is a need to analyse the implementation process and its character more deeply. This applies to a particular directive, which is seen as a source of secondary legislation of the European Union being subject to this process. No less important is to define the process more precisely, with particular emphasis on the doctrine of discrepancies occurring in the background of the distinction between the implementation and transposition of the EU law into the national law. This raises, in turn, the need to examine the implementation of the law-making process as a two-step operation. This feature is characteristic to the process of the implementation of the EU law into the Polish legal system and has no equivalent in the Polish constitutional order. The basis of the implementation process, which result from the primary law of the European Union, will also be characterized. They provide the foundation for the application of the EU law in Poland. They also show the obligation to ensure the effectiveness of the EU law in the national legal order, which simultaneously requires the imple mentation of the rights contained in the European Union directives. Another element of the study is to present the implementation of the legal basis contained in the Constitution of the Republic of Poland. The analysis of those basis leads to the conclusion that the Constitution of Poland contains provisions to the validity of both primary and secondary law of the European Union in Polish legal system. Therefore, they constitute the basis for the implementation of the EU directives into the national law. Issues emphasised in the work and connected with the process of the implementation of the EU law into the national law, are the foundation for the analysis of this process, as well as a starting point for further discussion on the mechanism of the implementation of the European Union law into the national law of the Republic of Poland.