CYIL vol. 10 (2019)

SANDRA BROŽOVÁ CYIL 10 ȍ2019Ȏ and its practical application, drawing a connecting line between national and international law, accompanied by the law of the European Union from the very beginning of the European economic integration in the end of the 1950s. As will be shown in this contribution, the historical development of the Czech state brought unique and remarkable incentives for judicatory interpretation of bilateral social security coordination treaties in the light of succession into rights and duties enshrined in these treaties as a consequence of the dissolution of the Czechoslovak federation, connected by the classical international public law with every situation of State’s extinction followed by proclamation of newly established State or States. 1. Social security coordination treaties and the ways of how to interpret them Let us remember that the international social security regulation is based on a method of coordination which means that international treaties do not contain material norms themselves but are mainly focused on determining the applicable law of a particular state party, in the classical conflict-of-laws style. The prevailing part of the relevant court cases that are going to be presented in this article is therefore devoted to solve the question of whether to apply a particular treaty on the pending case and as a following issue what choice of internal law to follow, based on the conflict-of-law rules enshrined in the applied coordination treaty. In general, the public international law doctrine related to treaty interpretation contains a rule that the identical texts of two or more treaties cannot be automatically interpreted in the same way only with reference to the same wording. The real factual circumstances of every bilateral relationship of concerned countries should be taken into due account. It is therefore possible to conduct different interpretation of two formally identical treaties not binding on the same countries. However, the Czech court simply argued that due to the same text, the treaties can be interpreted in the same way, without any special attention to the circumstances of conclusion and functioning of both the treaties. While general rules of treaty interpretation say that it is not suitable to conduct the same interpretation only on the base of the same words in the identical text of two treaties, the Czech court did not hesitate to do so without any extensive reasoning, just with the brief (and succinct) mention of the same wording of two treaties. 3 2. Succession after federation: Czechoslovak pensions The crucial problem was caused by Art. 20 of the Czech-Slovak treaty on social security coordination. 4 This treaty provision stipulated that all retirement pensions in the future will be distributed according to the location of the seat of the employer on the last day of the federation (31 December 1992). This connecting factor was included in the treaty text because it was presumed to be very easily, unequivocally applied in administrative processes using this treaty provision in the application practice. The decision to choose this connecting factor did not take into due account the fact that the formal seat of the employer’s headquarters had often very weak relevance to the actual work performance and therefore 3 See the judgments of the Czech Supreme Administrative Court, File No. 6 Ads 14/2011. 4 The Treaty between the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic on social security was negotiated at the final stage of the federation on 29 October 1992 and entered into force on 3 May 1993. See No. 228/1993 Coll. in the Czech Republic.

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