The judge of the Constitutional Court, Prof. Dr. Ana Pavlovska-Daneva addressed the Panel on "Legal counseling on contemporary topics Decisions of the Constitutional Court vis - a - vis Decisions from the regular judiciary" at the Annual International Conference which marked 73 years of the founding of the Faculty of Law "Justinian Prvi" - Skopje.

The focus of her presentation was the topic of "Cohabitation of the Constitutional Court and regular courts in the Republic of North Macedonia".

Prof. Dr. Pavlovska-Daneva emphasized that the Macedonian legal framework lacks procedural provisions for the actions of regular courts in connection with the execution of decisions made by the Constitutional Court, and in connection with a submitted request for the protection of human rights and freedoms.

"Any attempt to interpret the provisions of the new Act of the Constitutional Court and the Law on Courts (as well as to apply the no longer existing provision of the Rules of Procedure of the Constitutional Court that preceded the new Act) in the direction of the existence of the competence of the Constitutional Court to annul a final decision of the regular judiciary, collides with the impossibility of real implementation of such decisions of the Constitutional Court due to the absence of special procedural norms in the Macedonian legislation regulating the judicial procedure – the Law on Criminal Procedure, the Law on Civil Procedure and the Law on Administrative Disputes. This would mean that it remains the task of the regular judiciary through its practice (which is extremely modest) to arrange the rules of its own conduct in case of annulment of its decision by the Constitutional Court, which represents an undesirable reality", emphasized Pavlovska-Daneva.

As a second, but extremely significant topic that causes dilemmas in general, not only in our country, the judge prof. Dr. Pavlovska-Daneva pointed out the following: "Whether and how regular courts can evaluate the constitutionality of a law during the conduct of court proceedings?"

Analyzing how this issue is regulated, one comes to the conclusion that during their administration of justice and decision-making in specific cases, judges in the regular judiciary can also appreciate the constitutionality of laws, so they will not apply a certain (according to them unconstitutional) law, solving the case immediately based on the Constitution or submitting an initiative to the Constitutional Court.

"The Constitution stipulates that the courts judge on the basis of the Constitution, laws and international agreements ratified in accordance with the Constitution, which implies that the judge can immediately apply the Constitution when he considers that a certain law is unconstitutional, and as a confirmation of the strength of this interpretation appears and article 18, paragraph 2 of the Law on Courts, where it is provided that if the court considers that the law to be applied in the specific case is not in accordance with The Constitution, and the constitutional provisions cannot be applied directly, will stop the procedure until a decision is made by the Constitutional Court", says judge Pavlovska-Daneva.

As examples from judicial practice in this direction, he cited the actions of the Criminal Court in Skopje, which before the adoption of the new Law on Criminal Procedure, directly applied the Constitutional Amendments when making a decision on the duration of detention. He also mentioned the example from last year when part of the provisions of the Law on Amendments and Supplements to the Law on Obligation Relations from 2023, regarding the new statute of limitations, were not applied by the judges in the basic civil courts, evaluating it this decision-making as a type of so-called "passive" evaluation of the constitutionality of the specific Law by ignoring it. Part of the analysis of this topic is the Law on Administrative Disputes from 2019 when the judges refused to apply a provision by which the legislator provided a deadline for filing a lawsuit for the initiation of the so-called a previous administrative dispute or a dispute of silence of the administration – a legal provision that was undoubtedly contrary to the constitutionally-guaranteed right of every citizen to judicial protection against the acts and actions of the state.

"In the last two cases, the judges did not dare to make decisions based directly on a provision of the Constitution, nor did they use the legal opportunity from Art. 18 of the Law for the courts to stop the court proceedings and submit an initiative for the evaluation of the constitutionality of the law before the Constitutional Court. "Simply, by ignoring them, they did not apply the legal provisions that they considered to be contrary to the Constitution", concluded the judge Prof. Dr. Pavlovska-Daneva.

Our domestic practice is modest in these matters, but the European literature recognizes numerous examples of conflicts between the competences of the constitutional courts and those of the regular courts, the judge. For the preparation of the paper that follows from the held Conference, a comparative experience of the cohabitation between the Constitutional Courts and the regular judiciary in Poland, Italy, Germany and Portugal was analyzed. The opinion of the Venice Commission, which highlights this issue as a weakness of the centralized model of constitutional control, is especially appreciated, notes the judge Prof. Dr. Pavlovska-Daneva in his presentation at the Faculty of Law.