Administrative internal acts are various documents intended for the administration's internal operations, and serve as general internal guidelines on how the body should act in specific cases. Internal acts are not legal sources of other acts, have no legal power, and generally are not accessible to the public. Due to their characteristics, which further separate existing legal rules that are hierarchically higher placed, they are also similar to other regulation acts of the executive branch of government. Their legal nature becomes controversial when they contain abstract general norms, but are not issued in the manner prescribed for the general administrative act. They indirectly or directly influence the legal status of entities by their external actions outside of the administrative body, regulate their rights and obligations, but are not accessible to them because of their legal nature. This undermines the control of legality over the administration's functioning, while the hidden rules in the form of internal acts are unconstitutional and contrary to the principle of the division of power, which is one of the fundamental elements of a modern state. An interesting question arising in connection with the legal nature of internal acts is also in which types of cases the nature of law can be attributed to such acts. The Canadian Supreme Court recognized a civil servant's notes as the reasons for the decision of the judgment, even though they were not mentioned in the decision itself. Similarly, in the EU, where the letter from the Vice-President of the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Community, and the notice of the Deputy Secretary-General to the staff of the Common Assembly were considered a decision in the judgment.
|