Admissibility of lodging a complaint with an administrative court against a decision taken by a first instance authority

This article presents issues related to the necessity of prior exhaustion of appeal measures, if they served the complainant in the proceedings before the authority competent in the case in order to effective filing of a complaint before an administrative court. The study focuses on providing an answer to the following question: whether and in what situations it is permissible to lodging a complaint to the administrative court against a decision issued by the first instance authority. Focus is also given to the issue of the legal consequences of the decision-issuing authority’s and the appeal body’s misclassification of the document filed as an appeal or complaint, as well as rulings of the administrative court that should be issued depending on the given case. The methods employed in this study involve an analysis of the law in force and a case study. After conducting research, it was found that provisions allowing for the possibility of challenging the decision of the first instance authority before an administrative court without the need to exhaust appeal measures available to the party are admissible, but constitute an exception to the constitutional principle of two-instance proceedings and should therefore be interpreted strictly.