On 1 March 1990, after the Velvet Revolution, the old coat of arms became the official symbol of the "Slovak Republic", which was still part of Czechoslovakia. Based on the Constitution of the Slovak Republic of September 3, 1992, the same coat of arms became the symbol of independent Slovakia, which arose on January 1, 1993. A law of February 18, 1993, precised the details of the coat of arms: for example, though not explicitly defined in the coat's blazon in the past, during the World War II era the cross mostly used to be depicted with convex endings of the stake and the bars; therefore the new description clearly reads to depict them as concave.