Criminal complaints abused for political gain

In the Czech legal system, a criminal complaint is a means for a citizen to alert police, prosecutors or judges to a potential crime, giving law enforcement extra eyes and ears in the form of the very people they are charged with protecting.

More recently, however, criminal complaints have transitioned into a potent public relations weapon whereby government ministers and politicians file such complaints against one another, follow it up with a press conference, and then count on a complicit press to report the filing but do little follow-up on the results of the investigation, which often leads nowhere.

The end result is a blow against a political opponent without actually producing proof of any wrongdoing. Whether the accusation proves true or false is immaterial, as guilt by association places a black mark on said adversary, putting them on the defensive.

In recent weeks, both Constitutional Court Chairman Pavel Rychetský and Supreme State Attorney Pavel Zeman have publicly complained about the increasingly common practice, which experts say has the potential to divert law enforcement's attention from legitimate criminal investigations and further degrade the level of political debate.

"In a normal, civilized, democratic country, which we are not, this doesn't happen," said Vladimíra Dvořáková, director of the political science department at the University of Economics Prague.

"Everybody has some information on someone else, and it is sort of like a mafia situation where these things are used as blackmail."

While the trend is particularly obvious as a political tactic, it seems filing criminal complaints is also growing increasingly common among the general public. According to police statistics, criminal complaints filed by private citizens increased 248 percent between 2000 and 2010, with investigations prompted by public complaints more than six times greater than those launched by police themselves last year.

Still, since the beginning of this year, criminal complaints have been utilized repeatedly in attempts by politicians to gain the upper hand for their party as members of the tri-partite governing coalition engage in a festering power struggle.

"Yes, the criminal complaint process might be abused, notwithstanding the threat of penalty," said Bill Finney, an attorney with the Prague-based law firm Giese & Partner.

As part of efforts to discredit and oust Defense Minister Alexandr Vondra (Civic Democrats-ODS), Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek (TOP 09) filed a criminal complaint about the so-called ProMoPro affair, an alleged overpriced contract that Vondra oversaw in 2009. Press conferences, interviews and television appearances by Kalousek followed.

In mid-April, Kalousek moved from instigator to target, as two Public Affairs (VV) deputies filed a criminal complaint against the Finance Ministry saying Kalousek failed to investigate alleged misallocation of state subsidies. They also held a press conference.

A few days later one of those deputies, Josef Novotný, filed two more criminal complaints and again held a press conference. A second complaint was directed at Kalousek and the other at Agriculture Minister Ivan Fuksa (ODS). Not coincidentally, VV was at the same time publicly calling for both men's resignation as the government was in the midst of bickering over a potential Cabinet reshuffle.

That pair of complaints, which were made public at the same time, targeted completely unrelated phenomena, with one raising questions about state-owned forest land and the other about gambling licenses. This raised even stronger questions about why they were launched simultaneously, if not as a political tactic.

And then of course there was the complaint filed by former VV Deputy Kristýna Kočí against VV financier Vít Bárta, saying he offered her a 500,000 Kč bribe. That complaint went public, along with one by another VV deputy, just days before before Kočí was kicked out of the party and caught on tape saying she had been working for nine months to sabotage her own party from the inside on behalf of the ODS.

The list of such practices is long, and "things are getting worse," Dvořáková said.

"In essence, it allows one politician to make a public accusation against another without proof," she added.

Indeed, according to another attorney at a leading Prague law firm who requested anonymity because "some of our clients file criminal complaints," when a lawyer is employed to write-up such a complaint, they can be crafted in such a way that they contain little to no evidence at all.

"If I give a criminal complaint against a deputy minister, I am protected," Dvořáková said, pointing to how the practice transfers responsibility for coming up with evidence from the accuser to investigators.

Dvořáková points to the aforementioned ProMoPro case as perhaps the most clear-cut example of utilizing law enforcement agencies for political gain.

Since taking over as defense minister in June 2010, Vondra has waged a highly public campaign to investigate past irregular defense contracts. Kalousek, as well as several of his deputies, formerly worked at the Defense Ministry when many of these suspicious deals took place.

"Immediately [after Vondra began investigating], there were public questions raised about the defense minister by people in the Finance Ministry, and some of those people used to work at the Defense Ministry," Dvořáková said.

While few experts dispute that Vondra mishandled the overpriced 2009 information technology contract that is at the center of the ProMoPro controversy, it is the timing of the revelations that point their use, via a criminal complaint, as a political tactic rather than an effort to expose wrongdoing. 

In a recent interview on Czech Television, Rychetský, the lead judge on the Constitutional Court, questioned the necessity of filing a criminal complaint about anything that has already been reported in the media. By law, police are obligated to investigate in any instance where a crime is reasonably suspected, regardless of whether they learn about it through a criminal complaint.

Unlike legal systems based on common law that often have elected public prosecutors, the appointed prosecutors in the Czech Republic - with a legal model based on the so-called Continental system - are given almost no leeway when deciding which cases to prosecute.

"Prosecutors are obliged to prosecute every crime they have knowledge of," the attorney who requested anonymity said.

In short, politicians who file criminal complaints often do so over issues that are already under investigation, meaning their complaint serves no legal purpose.

"They aren't telling the police anything new," the attorney said.

Benjamin Cunningham can be reached at
bcunningham@praguepost.com