IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 14

moment of the Helsinki process. All this
is important for our Cuban friends to
take into account. There are international
processes and inter-State factors that are
very relevant and affect the efficacy and
result of these dialogues. Palous
reminded us that lawyers from the
Prague Law School, who were, of
course, associated with the government,
attempted quite seriously to use the
classic argument that international
accords only imply international
obligations; that is, that articles and laws
from other international communities
could not be used as precedent for rights
for Czechoslovak citizens. This was an
extremely important point that had to be
deliberated
internationally
and,
according
to
Palous,
current
deliberations between the United States
and Cuba, and Cuba and the European
Union should include as much as
possible this element of legitimacy that
international law offers. The key here is
to legitimate citizen participation and the
possibility or efficacy of civil society’s
representatives. Palous’ second point
was on the post-revolutionary period and
talked about an element that had an
important influence when work on the
new Czech Republic’s constitution was
going to be worked on. Normativists
know the concept as that of a legal
revolution. What this means is that there
is discontinuity in the law. When there is
legal order, the new law essentially takes
power from the old one, which proves
there is legal continuity. All laws are still
in effect until they are replaced, but in a
legal revolution this does not apply. A

transition must be defined. Czech
constitutional tradition since 1918 said
that all the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s
laws would continue to be in effect with
the exception of those that were not
compatible with the new republic. It
took two years for the Czech constitution
to be accepted. Then Palous took us all
the way up to 1989, and asked us to take
notice of what happened. “Did we have a
legal revolution?” he asked. “If so,
when? It was certainly when we had the
Velvet Revolution in November 1989.
During the first two days two very
important actions were started: two
articles were excised from the
Constitution that had to do with the role
of the Communist Party’s leadership,
and the rest of our legal order remained
intact. We had free elections. More
importantly, and the reason Palous said
this was because it as only in January
1991 that the new parliament accepted
the bill of rights, two years after the
Velvet Revolution. That was the legal
revolution, according to contemporary
thought. This is when the discontinuity
of laws occurred and a very important
second chance for constitutional
deliberation
presented
itself.
A
deliberative process was organized so
that people themselves could offer
details about administrative practices,
and about all kinds of practices
regarding the country’s political and
social aspects. That way, it would be
possible to ask questions in public and
eventually produce deliberative actions.
Palous
ended
his
presentation
highlighting that the deliberative process

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