Legal Regulation of Election Campaign in the Czech Republic

The article deals with the issue of the campaigning in the Czech Republic in terms of the existing legal regulation and its real interpretation. The legal regulation of the field is strongly fragmented; that's the reason an explanation must relate to a series of other fields and necessarily is very complex. Therefore, the author deals with the most important laws including in the first place election laws, laws on mass media, civic code, law on trespasses, law on the right to assemble and criminal code. Afterwards he concentrates on the legal definition of the basic concepts, primarily the very concept of the election campaign and its temporal limitation. Second part of the article focuses on the efforts to formulate first principles of the legal regulation of the campaigning, among which we can especially rate the principle of equal political opportunities and realization of some basic rights such as freedom of speech, right to be informed and political rights. In the conclusion, the article defines the criteria enabling to decide whether the rules of the campaigning were broken or not.