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The Law on Civil Servants and Employees in Local and Regional-Self Government - a Review
Alen Rajko
; head of the Office for Administrative Development, Town of Opatija, Croatia
Abstract
The new Law on Civil Servants and Employees in Local and Regional Self-Government came in to force on 31st July 2008. After a decade and a half of provisory solutions, on that day, local civil service was, for the first time, regulated by the law whose »life« was not extended for the needs of local civil service years after it had ceased to be implemented on the state civil service. The Law is a so lid piece of regulation that has improved the circumstances in the field it regulates. Further more, many suggestions of local units’ associations were taken in to account during its drafting. This paper is devoted to possible further advances in regulating the matter. At the conceptual, legal-political level, the main disadvantages of the new Law are a missed chance to pass a uniform piece of civil servants regulation, substandard regulation of the institutes regulating state service, and, finally, delaying the regulation of the classification and remuneration
system for later period. A uniform regulation of the rights, obligations, and responsibilities of state and local civil servants need not interfere with the natural and prescribes differences between state administration and local self-government, including local autonomy. If one begins with the claim that there are no more or less important civil servants corpuses, one can not but wonder what the purpose
of partially substandard regulation of civil servants relations at local level is. The paper lists such substandard solutions, among which the most important refer to the second-instance body deciding on the appeals against first-instance acts in the matters of rights and responsibilities of local civil servants and employees.
The standards of local autonomy, the particularities of local units significantly different in size, and the insufficient administrative capacities of some local units are not in favour of too strict regulation of the classification system. It might be purposeful to bind the salaries to the budgetary capacity of a local unit. The legislator may perhaps determine the relations within the remuneration system,
but more than that would be questionable both autonomy and purpose-wise. The paper also contains an analysis of the more important legal voids (acting heads of administrative bodies, internal auditor on a separate place of work, competence of issuing the rule book on systematisation of work places, the protection of procedural rights of the candidates whose job applications are not taken in to consideration, etc.), certain normative in consistencies, the protection of whistle blowers, and the possible nomotechnical improvements
Keywords
the Law on Civil Servants and Employees in Local and Regional Self-Government, civil service system; civil service law; state civil service; local civil service
Hrčak ID:
135472
URI
Publication date:
4.12.2008.
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