The State Prosecutor’s Office has the statutory
power, as stipulated in the pro- vision of Article 385 (1) of the
Civil Procedure Act (CPA), to lodge the re- quest for the protection of
legality against a final judgment of a court. This constitutes an extraordinary
legal remedy in the public interest, the purpose of which is to ensure equality
before the law, legal predictability, and legal cer- tainty. The request by the state
prosecutor, as a public interest intervener, is therefore not a substitute for, nor exclusive
of, but complementary to, a party’s
revision. Where it is filed for the purpose of ensuring uniformity of case-law
and the development of the law, the State Prosecutor’s Office may lodge it only under the same conditions as those
under which the Supreme Court may al- low a revision
of the party. These conditions are laid down in Article
367a (1) of the CPA. They take the form of a general
clause on the objective importance of the legal issue for the
legal order as a whole, as the sole criterion for access to the Supreme Court.
Based on this criterion, both the Supreme Court and the State Prosecutor’s
Office conduct the preliminary procedure to establish the existence of a public
interest to lodge the extraordinary legal remedies. Both legal remedies lead to
an extraordinary review of a specific case before an enlarged panel of five judges
of the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court has
no legal basis to deny the state prosecutor, as an autonomous and independent
judicial body, a substantive review of a request for the protection of legality
on the grounds that it does not raise an important legal issue, provided that it meets all the procedural prerequisites
set out in Article 374 of the CPA. In such a case, the Supreme Court must
decide on the merits of the request for the
protection of legality
on the basis of the relevant provisions of Articles 378, 379 and 380 of the CPA.
Key words: state prosecutor,
public interest, legal interest, presumptions for admissibility of a remedy,
revision, request for the protection of legality, extraordinary legal
remedies, Supreme Court.