The Office
of the Chamber of Deputies

About Office

The exercise of the mandate of a deputy is inconceivable without the professional administrative and technical support provided for the deputies by the Office of the Chamber of Deputies. The Office of the Chamber of Deputies and its staff are an integral part of the parliamentary machinery and thus deserve space in this book.

Elected representatives to representative bodies are in direct contact with three groups of professional staff involved in providing the background for their work.

The first group consists of the employees of political parties, the second group is formed by personal assistants (if the members of the parliament are entitled to them), and the third group is directly employed by the chamber of the parliament. The main difference between these three groups is the way in which they interact with the deputies. The party background is directly assumed to be ideologically defining and influencing the deputies’ decision making. In the case of the parliamentary staff, on the contrary, such manifestations are not expected and are even considered to be undesirable and unacceptable. In some countries, independence is formally guaranteed by the inclusion of parliamentary staff in the civil service system; in the Czech Republic, their impartiality is formally enshrined in labour law. The exclusion of parliamentary staff from the civil service system is based on the principle of protecting the parliament from interference by the executive. The Czech legislation is thus based on the traditional British model, which provides for a clear separation of parliamentary staff from the civil service.

From the Past of the Parliamentary Administration

In the Czech environment, the roots of the administrative parliamentary background can be traced back to the establishment of the land diet in 1861. The members of the assembly took advantage of not only the background of the land commission but also of the services of the diet’s own office. The land commission was the executive head of the local government, taking care of land hospitals, roads, the statistical office and other areas that fell under the jurisdiction of the land government. The Rules of Procedure of the Land Diet created the office of the land diet, which assisted the Grand Marshal, presiding over the assembly, and his deputy. The office consisted of a secretary and four scribes, who recorded the proceedings of the meetings and kept voting lists.

Even after the establishment of the independent Czechoslovak state in 1918, it was a matter of course that the legislators found the necessary support for their work thanks to the parliamentary officials. After all, the first head of the National Assembly’s administration , Jaroslav Haasz, was the author of the Rules of Procedure of the first Czechoslovak Parliament. After the establishment of the two chambers of the parliament in 1920, the provisions of the Rules of Procedure of the Chamber of Deputies of the National Assembly created an office and a library. The office was headed by a secretary. The tasks of the office included taking minutes, dealing with resolutions of meetings and parliamentary bodies, administering the archives and providing financial and accounting services. The office also maintained electoral rolls. The status and salary conditions of the office employees were regulated by special Act No.328/1920 Coll., on the Organisation of the Offices of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate. The office was subordinated to the Praesidium of the Chamber of Deputies.

The scope of the tasks of the parliamentary offices in Czechoslovakia in the period of 1948–1989 must be seen in the context of the regulation of the mandate of a Member of Parliament. Formally, the authoritarian régime granted members of parliament considerable autonomy and powers, both in relation to the government and in their individual position within the parliament. The undemocratic centralised political decision making that under socialism subordinated decisions of the parliament to a prior decision of the Communist Party virtually precluded the existence of sovereign parliamentary decision making. Ordinary parliamentary procedures were thus suppressed and formalised. The undemocratic nature of the regime did not allow deputies to exercise these rights fully, but the written rules of procedure granted a wide range of powers to individual deputies. This fact also influenced the subsequent form of the free mandate after the regime change in 1989.

The emergence of a professional non-political background is related to the process of parliamentary emancipation in the early 1990s. After the fall of the Communist regime, the importance of the parliament within the political system was redefined. The parliament was primarily emancipated in relation to the executive.

The Organisational Structure and Activities of the Office of the Chamber of Deputies

The Office of the Chamber of Deputies is managed under a separate budget chapter of the state budget called ‘Chamber of Deputies’. The process of approving this part of the state budget has legal specifics in comparison with the process of approving the budget of administrators of ordinary chapters (e.g. ministries). It is an autonomous budget (like the budgets of the Office of the Senate, the Office of the President of the Republic, the Constitutional Court, the Supreme Audit Office, the Office of the National Budget Council and the Office of the Ombudsman). The budget of the Office contains funds not only for the activities of the Office itself but also for the work of elected representatives, i.e. funds for the payment of the deputies’ salaries and allowances, funds for the deputies’ offices in Prague, regions, the services of assistants or the deputies’ business trips.

The organisational structure of the Office of the Chamber of Deputies is regulated by the Rules of Internal Governance, issued by the Steering Committee of the Chamber of Deputies on the basis of a proposal by the head of the Office of the Chamber of Deputies. Since it is an internal regulation of the Office, the structure of the Office is approved only by the body of the Chamber of Deputies that is responsible for organising the work of the political representation and is in fact a self-governing body of the Chamber of Deputies. The involvement of the political representation in the organisational structure of the Office is based on the fact that the administrative background is created to ensure the activities necessary for political decision making.

The current structure of the Office of the Chamber of Deputies comprises, in addition to the usual divisions, the Office of the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, the professional department of the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and the secretariats of the Deputy Speakers of the Chamber of Deputies. The employees of these departments are accountable to the head of the Office in accordance with the Rules of Internal Governance on employment relationships, but their work is guided in particular by the instructions of the relevant officials of the Chamber of Deputies. Article 3 of the Rules of Internal Governance explicitly states that: ‘The Directorand other employees of the Office of the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies are accountable to the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and, in employment relations, to the head of the Office; the director of the Office of the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies also performs the duties of the secretary to the Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies. The employees of the secretariat of the Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies are accountable to the Deputy Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and, in employment relations, to the head of the Office.’ A somewhat similar situation occurs in the case of the secretariats of the committees and commissions of the Chamber of Deputies, in particular with regard to the secretaries of the committees and commissions. They are also guided in their work by the instructions of the chairpersons of those bodies. However, the Rules of Internal Governance do not provide for this. The directors or heads of other departments are directly guided by the instructions of the head of the Office.

The employees of the Office of the Chamber of Deputies cooperate with their colleagues from foreign parliamentary administrations. The involvement of the representatives of the Office in standard inter-parliamentary organisations facilitates a long-term exchange of experience. In the period of the re-establishment of standard parliamentary mechanisms after the fall of Communism, it was important that the staff of the Office could share the experience of foreign colleagues from countries with long-term democratic development. It is thus natural that the employees of the Office are currently involved in training and working visits to other parliaments that seek foreign inspiration for their successful development. This cooperation is also important in the knowledge that the interconnectedness and professional cooperation of parliamentary administrators is an important complement to the inter-parliamentary diplomacy formed at the political level.

The Chamber of Deputies and the Public

The public perceives the parliament as the supreme body that performs supervisory and legislative functions. What is often overlooked is the fact that the parliament is the main instrument of political representation and thus lends legitimacy to the entire constitutional and political system. It is all the more important continually to draw attention to the fact that without parliaments, the standard decision-making processes that we associate with a democratic society would not exist. Reaching out to the public is a natural ambition of politicians, who do so in the context of their value and programme preferences.

Therefore, the Office provides dignified services to politicians and journalists on the premises of the Chamber of Deputies. In addition, however, the public is also entitled to be sufficiently informed about the general nature of Czech parliamentarism, parliamentary procedures and the presentation of the importance of the representative body in a free society.

Therefore, the Office of the Chamber of Deputies itself takes an active approach to the presentation of parliamentary topics through its information policy, with the basic principles of its strategy being political neutrality, in which the content of communication and educational activities is defined by the provisions of the Constitution of the Czech Republic and related legislation.

For those interested in parliamentary events, the Information Centre of the Chamber of Deputies has been available to the public since 2006. Like the Senate, it provides information on parliamentary procedures and current events in the Chamber of Deputies. Those interested in parliamentary topics have access there to a wide range of information material produced by the professional staff of the Chamber of Deputies, taking into account different requirements on the scope, detail and expertise.
The Office of the Chamber of Deputies produces miscellaneous educational programmes aimed primarily at the younger generation and teachers. They combine efforts to educate important elements of society with an attractive experience of a visit to the Chamber of Deputies or a simulation of a parliamentary session.

The Office of the Chamber of Deputies also cooperates with scientific institutes, thus often initiating or supporting research and the subsequent popularisation of parliamentary topics among the professional public. The results of such research are often presented on the floor of the parliament.

Last but not least, the Office seeks to contribute to building the institutional memory of the parliament. In recent years, statuesand paintings of prominent parliamentary figures of the past, i.a. T. G. Masaryk and F. L. Rieger, have been installed on the premises of the Chamber of Deputies. Historical anniversaries from the history of the Czech Chamber of Deputies are commemorated by exhibitions in the foyer of the Chamber of Deputies. Many of the representative rooms have been named after historically important figures of the representative body in the last two centuries of Czech parliamentarism. In this way, too, the Office Chamber of Deputies is trying to contribute to the awareness that the parliament has an indisputable place in the organism of any free and democratic society.

Organisational Chart