CYIL vol. 12 (2021)

Birutė Pranevičienė – Violeta Vasiliauskienė – Harald Scheu CYIL 12 (2021) Commission of the Republic of Lithuania was appointed by a Decree of Prime Minister, according to the old version of the Law on Civil Protection, and not by the Decree of the Government, as indicated in the amended version of the abovementioned law. Thus, it was only a procedural infringement, and the aspects of the limitations of human rights were not discussed. 4.1 Legislative field The analysis of the legislative acts in the COVID-19 pandemic illustrates the complexity of the situation that the countries faced. The applicable regimes in both countries were twofold. Firstly, the regime of national emergency (in Lithuania – regime of extraordinary situation) was activated in both countries. In the Czech Republic the regime is described in two laws, the Security Act and the Crisis Act, in Lithuania the proclamation of extraordinary situation is foreseen in the Law on Civil Protection. Furthermore, both states activated the regime of quarantine, 41 based on corresponding laws – in Lithuania, the Law on Contagious Diseases, in the Czech Republic the Public Health Act. Thus, at this point we can see that the application of two regimes simultaneously may cause and caused legal confusion due to different provisions on the limitations on human rights, different powers of the institutions, different time terms etc. The present pandemic has shown that the legal acts were not completely suitable for the regulation of this wide-ranging pandemic. Further legal changes were necessary. The Lithuanian legislature had to specify the provisions on the regime of quarantine, detailing which measures, including those limiting the right to movement, are possible in a time of quarantine. The Czech Parliament prepared a special act for this particular pandemic situation clarifying the legal issues that were problematic under the other legal regimes. It is interesting to note that the regime foreseen in the new law did not substitute the other two regimes but instead added to the complexity by being applied besides other legal regimes in this difficult situation. Regarding the proportionality requirement, it can be mentioned that neither the Lithuanian Constitution nor the Law on Contagious Diseases explicitly mention the requirement that the measures restricting human rights in these special situations must be proportionate to the aims sought by them. On the other hand, the Law on Civil Protection in Article 301 which was added to the law in April 2020 and regulates the restrictions on the economic activity, states that the government needs to uphold the principle of proportionality in establishing the measures and abolish them with no delay once the reasons for their establishment have ceased to exist. The Czech legal regulation foresees the requirement of proportionality in Article 6(1) of the Crisis Act which stipulates that during a state of emergency the Government 41 In Lithuania, this regime is named as quarantine, quarantine being „a special regime for the prevention and control of communicable diseases in individual establishments (hereinafter “restricted quarantine facilities”) or in infected areas (hereinafter “area quarantine”) when the communicable pathogens of unknown origin are registered or particularly serious communicable diseases outbreaks or epidemics of communicable diseases occur.“ In Czech Republic, under section 7 of the Public Health Act the term quarantine means the separation of a healthy natural person suspected of being infected from other natural persons in order to prevent transmission of an infectious disease at a time when the disease could spread. 4. Findings

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