Babiš Government Slams Bypassing of Legal Review — While Doing Exactly That Itself

Prime Minister Andrej Babiš's government has come out swinging against the practice of passing laws without proper professional review — even as it actively relies on that very method to push bills through parliament. That's according to Justice Minister Pavel Blažek, who made the remarks after the cabinet meeting on July 20, with Finance Minister Alena Schillerová echoing similar complaints shortly after.

At issue is the law on the so-called "child certificate" — a document confirming that its holder has no record of serious crimes and can safely work with children. The law was passed during the previous parliamentary term and is set to take effect at the start of next year.

A botched job with no expert review

According to Blažek, the law is worded so poorly that some workers will effectively be required to renew their clean certificate every three months — something the lawmakers who passed the amendment certainly never intended. The problem, he explained, is that the measure went through as a deputy's amendment, meaning it skipped the usual process of interdepartmental consultation and professional scrutiny.

"To put it mildly, this is essentially a botched piece of legislation that can't function without placing a bureaucratic burden on the very people it affects," the minister told reporters after the cabinet session.

Finance Minister Alena Schillerová raised similar concerns later regarding a law on municipal funding. According to her, in the previous term, an important bill was submitted directly through the Chamber of Deputies and bypassed interdepartmental review, whereas the current cabinet had sent its own version of the bill through that exact process.

The cabinet's double standard

Yet the current Babiš government itself readily uses this same tactic to dodge professional scrutiny. It wasn't the government but individual deputies who introduced, for example, the amendment to the building law, the repeal of the civil service law, the option for pensioners to withdraw their pension savings early without penalty, and, more recently, the ban on mobile phones in schools.

Minister Blažek himself admitted, while addressing the Chamber of Deputies on the "child certificate" issue, that the Babiš cabinet has grown fond of the very method it criticizes — and is now facing the consequences.

"I have a feeling that many of these problems arise precisely because this bill never went through the standard legislative procedure. This is exactly what you're now criticizing the current government for — perhaps rightly so — that certain things skipped the normal process. And unfortunately, the child certificate is one of them," the minister admitted.

According to Tomáš Nachtigal, a lawyer and expert in constitutional and administrative law, government-sponsored bills are typically better prepared and better justified, and less likely to leave the legal system tangled or to see one law effectively override another without formally repealing it.

The cabinet is already drawing criticism from professional bodies as well. In July, the Czech Bar Association urged the government to abandon the practice of pushing bills through as deputy proposals and return to the standard legislative procedure, noting that such initiatives often escape the necessary critical review, resulting in laws that are unclear or poorly drafted from a technical standpoint.

Around Prague, based on reporting by novinky.cz