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Court upholds right to march

City Hall continues fight to ban plans of neo-Nazi group

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
October 24th, 2007 issue

 A neo-Nazi group could march through town on the anniversary of Kristallnacht, after Prague’s city court upheld their right to do so.
Prague Town Hall has banned the planned march twice, saying that its purpose was to incite intolerance and racial hatred.
Kristallnacht was the night in 1938 when Nazis destroyed Jewish businesses.
After each ban the far-right group represented by activist Erik Sedláček took the city to court and won.
Fero Banyai, the leader of the Prague Jewish Community, says that while he is not judging the court’s decision, he doesn’t think that it is okay for the group to march.
“I mean, during Sabbath, this neo-Nazi march clearly has an anti-Jewish motive,” he says.
Originally, the group The Young National Democrats announced that they planned to march through the Jewish quarter on that day to protest the Czech Republic’s involvement in the Iraq war.
After getting resistance from City Hall, Sedláček offered to postpone the march until Nov. 17, the national holiday marking the collapse of communism in 1989.
“We are aware that the staging of a march on this day may have a certain negative undertone and make an inappropriate impression,” Sedláček said, according to an Oct. 4 Czech News Agency (ČTK) report. The Prague Post could not reach Sedláček by press time.
But City Hall, calling Sedláček’s stated reason for the march “fictitious,” could not approve this plan because the Jewish Liberal Union had scheduled a street meeting in the Jewish quarter that day, ČTK reports.
Meanwhile, the Prague Jewish Community has called for a commemoration of Kristallnacht to take place in the Jewish quarter Nov. 10.
Banyai says that the march is not representative of the state of anti-Semitism in the Czech Republic.
“In general, the situation in the Czech Republic is good, or very good. Nevertheless, the [extremist] group exists. Unfortunately, this ping-pong match between City Hall and the court has contributed to putting this group into the spotlight.”
City Hall is contemplating its next move.
“We will use all the means we can to ban it,” says spokesman Jiří Wolf. “Currently we are waiting for a written resolution of the court, which is to be here [Oct. 24].”
—Naďa Černá contributed to this report.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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