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Justice denied

The decision to drop the Čunek investigation is another shameful violation of human rights
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October 17th, 2007 issue

By Gwendolyn Albert

The one-year anniversary of the eviction and deportation of hundreds of Roma from the town of Vsetín was marked by the news that the police decided to halt their investigation into whether Deputy Prime Minister Jiří Čunek (KDU-ČSL), the former mayor of Vsetín, violated the law when presiding over these events.

For those interested in the legal niceties, the Romea civic association has posted all 17 pages of the police decision on its website. Romea is considering taking further legal steps in the matter, and some of the families involved also immediately filed complaints with the public prosecutor over the charges being dropped.

Compared to the report published last month on the Vsetín evictions by Ombudsman Otakar Motejl, this police decision is yet another example of how the authorities responsible for criminal investigations and the ombudsman, the country’s primary human rights watchdog, are capable of coming to very different conclusions about the very same evidence.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the police decision is its characterization of the news reporting surrounding the evictions, described as having involved “suggestive questions,” and the subsequent conclusion that this publicity is what led to the criminal charges being filed. Reading this, one gets the feeling that the police were primarily concerned not with investigating the actions of the former mayor, but with how it was even possible that charges were filed in the first place.

After reviewing the Vsetín evidence, the ombudsman found that the resettlement of people into a completely different administrative area hundreds of kilometers away was an “intrusion into the fundamental right to respect for private and family life.” The decision to remove them from the building in question in Vsetín was formally legal, since a court had ordered the flats to be vacated. And in a strictly legal sense, the town did provide alternate “housing” to the tenants — though unfortunately, as the news media (to its credit) reported, the properties were unfit for habitation.

The ombudsman also found that, as far as the method of eviction was concerned — deportation in the middle of the night, separation of children from their parents, coercing the impoverished into assuming debts in order to purchase uninhabitable “homes” by threatening to send their children into state care, etc. — a “substantial violation of the right of the inhabitants to human dignity” had been committed by the town of Vsetín.

Former Mayor Čunek was charged with abusing the powers of a public official, defamation, slander, restricting personal liberty, extortion, persecution and fraud. The police seem to have bought wholesale Mr. Čunek’s explanation that, since a court had approved the demolition of the building from which the Romany families were evicted, he and the town leadership were within their rights to take the measures they did to get the tenants out.

This premise has parallels in other criminal investigations of serious human rights abuses in this country, notably the criminal charges filed by the ombudsman himself in the cases of coercive sterilization of Romany women. According to the victims’ legal representatives, the police investigating these charges have so far given full credence to the doctors’ assertions that they believed their actions — sterilizing women without fully informing them beforehand of the irreversible effects of such surgery — were completely medically sound.

In effect, the absence of any overt intent of harming the victims means the police can see no wrongdoing in these cases, despite recent court rulings that such sterilizations constitute rights violations. And despite a statement by one state prosecutor that sterilization performed without fully informed consent does actually constitute a crime. And despite the opinion of the ombudsman that in the cases he reviewed, the law was violated. (Editor’s note: Late last week, the regional court in Ostrava agreed with that assessment and awarded a Romany woman 500,000 Kč in compensation. See story, A1.)

In July of this year, the United Nations Human Rights Committee called on the government of the Czech Republic to institute criminal proceedings against the alleged perpetrators of the coercive sterilizations. It also called on the government to prevent unjustified evictions. And it called on the government to consider adopting an action plan for human rights education for public officials and police officers. These were the third set of such recommendations made to the Czech government by a U.N. human rights treaty oversight body during the past twelve months.

However, unless there is a political demand by the citizenry to meet these requirements, the government — particularly the current government — is unlikely to act on any of the recommendations. And that political demand will not be generated until all members of Czech society begin to identify with the victims of these violations, until everyone here begins to understand that the violation of the dignity of one woman or one family is a violation of the dignity of us all — and that the violators need to be punished.

Is this political demand likely to be generated anytime soon? Unfortunately, anti-Roma sentiment in this society is so widespread that when the victims of such outrages are Roma, the potential for most of society to empathize with the victims is practically nil. In fact, as can be seen from the Internet chat room responses to reports of these violations, there are many who openly welcome any and all victimization of members of the Roma minority.

We will never know if the police would have investigated the Vsetín evictions or the coercive sterilization cases differently had their victims been Czech. Are the Roma being subjected to such violations in this society because of their ethnicity? There is a decade or more of overwhelming evidence that they clearly are. But apparently, it’s all “legal.”

— Gwendolyn Albert is the Director of the Women’s Initiatives Network of the Peacework Development Fund

Further reading:

Full text of the police decision (in Czech only):

http://romea.cz/index.php?id=detail&detail=2007.3185

(in the box marked “Dokument”)

The ombudsman’s report on the Vsetín evictions (in English):

http://www.ochrance.cz/dokumenty/document.php?doc=798

The squalid living conditions of the evicted Roma:

http://www.praguepost.com/articles/2007/04/11/cast-out.php

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