Amnestie Václava Klause – sedmá část
The Anticorruption Endowment (NFPK) has released the fifth part of a study containing basic facts and quotes from the rulings of selected courts and public prosecutors, concerning the application of Article II of the amnesty declared by Václav Klaus in 2013. This part highlights the rulings passed by the Office of High Prosecutor and High Court in Prague.
Just like in case of the rulings issued by the High Court in Olomouc, most of the rulings passed by the High Court in Prague address complaints by public prosecutors, who “protested” against the halting of criminal proceedings, ordered by regional courts. Public prosecutors again fought for any formulation, which would have reversed the court decisions to halt the proceedings. Again, their attempts proved mostly futile.
The rulings again literally ooze painstaking efforts to observe legal “correctness”. In several cases the accused had been sentenced, in the past, to many years of unsuspended incarceration, but the Prague High Court, acting as a court of appeals, invariably returned the cases to the lower instances. Consequently, the criminal proceedings dragged on until finally being halted by this amnesty. President of the Supreme Administrative Court Josef Baxa said about the Prague High Court in 2009: “It’s a Carpathian Castle, they [Prague High Court] pass opaque judgements and have a tendency to solve things in secrecy.” (SPURNÝ, Jaroslav; KUNDRA, Ondřej. Štěstí soudce Kučery. 23. 3. 2009. Respekt.) Jaroslav Bureš, a long-serving official of the Prague High Court, had long been considered one of Klaus’s favourite choices (for more see here).
In respect of the remaining rulings, the above-mentioned court, acting in the capacity of appeals court, halted criminal proceedings upon the arrival of the amnesty. In four cases, criminal proceedings were thus suspended against persons who are thought to have wreaked damages exceeding 1.2 billion CZK. In one case, more than 20,000 persons suffered damage (the extent of the file with all its enclosures markedly exceeded 10,00 print pages).
In case of the Office of High Public Prosecutor in Prague, the amnesty made the prosecutors issue three rulings that halted criminal proceedings against persons thought to have caused damages in excess of 270 million CZK. The tenor of the texts differs from that provided by most of their fellow judges.
It should be noted that as indicated by the rulings, obtained from the regional and high courts and public prosecutors nationwide, the defendants whose prosecution was halted were thought to have caused damages amounting to at least 18.6 billion crowns, with additional damages to the tune of at least 3.4 billion crowns being averted. Damages were said to have been incurred on over 90,000 natural persons and hundreds of legal entities.
We must add, in conclusion, that the Anticorruption Endowment Board of Directors decided to release the full names of the prosecuted and amnestied persons wherever they could be asserted after the fact.
The Anticorruption Endowment is a fully independent initiative by people radically unprepared to accept a high level of corruption in state administration. One of our goals is to help expose corruption in state administration and support projects exposing corruption.
Attachments – Ruling on criminal proceedings stay under Article II of President Václav Klaus’s decree on amnesty from 1 January 2013:
Contacts please: Martin Soukenka, NFPK Analyst, e-mail: martin.soukenka@nfpk.cz
