ABSTRACT
In the following text I shall give an overview of some of the most important cases which hopefully will shed some light on how exactly the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia has acted when faced with situations of crisis and whether, in such contexts, it has been changing its practice that had been developed in ‘peaceful’ times. In the next section (War, security and terrorism) I will describe some constitutional experiences related to the, so far, only full-blown ‘war’ crisis which in Croatia occurred in the first part of the 1990s and will then proceed to explain further developments in the context of new security challenges that have appeared in recent years. As it will be shown, these two periods are quite revealing for examining the position of the Court in dealing with legislative attacks on rights and rule of law in security issues. Though in the context of real ‘war’ the Court showed extreme deference to emergency measures, in recent years it seems to have taken quite a different approach. In the latter sense, the case of the Law on Criminal Procedure from 2012 shows that the Court, when reviewing legislation regulating the balance between security and liberty, is able and willing to apply some rather strict scrutiny standards. The overall situation in this field, however, is far from clear and any general conclusion on how the Court will act in future cases of imminent and serious threat to the constitutional order might be quite premature. The main issue stems from the fact that basic modern legislative acts that deal with security matters in Croatia have not so far been examined by the Court and hence there is a lack of ‘evidence’.
