Slovakia¶
The Slovak cases show a government loosening the state’s obligations at home and abroad at once. Instruments against corruption have been weakened, civil society has been given public-sector duties without the label that would have announced their purpose, and the constitution now claims precedence over European law on cultural and ethical questions. The Constitutional Court and the Commission have pushed back on parts of this, so the outcome depends on one brake inside the country and one outside it.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Read these. Corruption cases lose the office that pursued them and the penalties that deterred them. Civil society organisations kept their donors’ privacy only by going to court, and may meet the next attempt by other means. Anyone relying on European law in matters the government calls cultural or ethical, LGBTQ people first, may find a Slovak court told to look elsewhere. An infringement judgment or the Constitutional Court could restore that reach; a later government could use the clause on any commitment it would like gone.
December 2025: The court strikes down the NGO law¶
On 17 December 2025 the Constitutional Court found that publishing donors’ data and contributions disproportionately intruded on their privacy and could chill giving, and that extending public-sector freedom-of-information duties to NGOs lacked sufficient justification; both were unconstitutional. The rest of the challenge failed. The clerks note that the paperwork the government kept when it dropped the label has now been struck out by the court.
September 2025: Identity above Europe¶
Slovakia’s parliament amended the constitution with 90 votes of the 99 deputies present. The amendment recognises two sexes, male and female, and states that on cultural and ethical issues national law takes precedence over European law. The European Commission’s 2026 rule of law report records that it opened an infringement procedure on 21 November 2025 for breaching “the principles of primacy, autonomy, effectiveness and uniform application of EU law”, and that the Venice Commission had advised against the amendments. The clerks note that stigmatisation, in the historical record, travels from pamphlet to government language. Here it went on to the constitution, and the Commission reads it as reaching the country’s European obligations too.
April 2025: The label comes off¶
The Slovak parliament passed its law on non-governmental organisations, and the final version dropped the terms “foreign agents” and “lobbying” that earlier drafts had carried. Organisations now carry the same freedom-of-information obligations as the public sector, whether or not they receive money from abroad. The clerks observe that the stigma was taken out of the title and the paperwork left in the body.
February 2024: The special prosecutor goes¶
On 8 February 2024 parliament adopted a package that abolishes the Special Prosecutor’s Office, which handles the most serious crimes, from 20 March, and brings “a radical reduction of penalties” for economic offences such as corruption and tax fraud. The government said it was ending what it called the office’s excesses. President Caputova said she would use all the legal instruments she had to stop it coming into force. The clerks note that an office was closed by statute over what the government called its excesses, and that the penalties for the crimes it handled were cut in the same vote.