The Constitutional Court can:
1. Examine your petition about a legal provision that violates your human rights or constitutional principles (review of constitutionality or legality of laws and regulations)
This means that you can only complain about a legal provision if you believe that it violates your human rights or constitutional principles because it is contrary to a higher legal provision or the Constitution.
If your application is accepted, the court can determine whether the legal provision you are complaining about violated your human rights or is contrary to constitutional principles. If the court concludes that the provision is contrary to a higher legal provision or the Constitution, it can declare that the legal provision has lost its force. The Court can decide whether the provision will no longer be in force from the day of the judgement onwards, from a later date or from an earlier date (only for regulations).
The Constitutional Court cannot grant you compensation for a violation of your rights. If the court has declared that a certain legal provision has violated your rights, you must apply for compensation to the court of general jurisdiction (civil court) or ask the institution which has applied that provision to revoke its decision and to compensate you.
2. Examine your constitutional complaint due to a violation of your human rights by a court decision (Constitutional complaint)
If your human rights have been violated by an individual act by which state authorities, local community authorities or bearers of public authority decided on your rights, obligations or legal entitlements and you have exhausted all other legal remedies, you can file a complaint to the Constitutional Court.
If your complaint is accepted, the court can determine the individual act violated your rights and declares it has lost its force. Then it remands the case to the authority competent to decide thereon or decides on the disputed right or freedom by itself.
If the Constitutional Court deems that the challenged individual act is based on a potentially unconstitutional or unlawful law or regulation, it initiates the above described proceedings for the review of the constitutionality or legality of such law or regulation.
The Constitutional Court cannot:
The Constitutional Court can only carry out those tasks which it is allowed to under the Constitution and the Constitutional Court Act. It has very specific functions and it does not have the same power to review specific disputes as higher courts in Slovenia.
Therefore, it cannot:
- examine complaints about the actions of private companies and persons
- re-examine the evidence of national court cases
- punish state officials or private individuals
- grant compensation to you due to violations of your human rights