Czech court fails to compensate Romani family attacked by racists

Members of a Romani family who were violently assaulted by racists in the Czech town of Nýrsko at the start of August 2011 have not been awarded compensation through the criminal courts. The District Court in Klatovy has rejected their request and instructed them to file a civil complaint in order to secure compensation. The state prosecutor will not be appealing the verdict.

Inadequate verdict

The victims’ attorney-in-fact, David Oplatek of the IN IUSTITIA association, does not consider the court’s verdict to be correct. "This is not proper, the perpetrators have been convicted of a racially motivated crime, the damage to the victims’ health has been proven by medical reports for both of them, and the non-monetary harms have also been shown. There was nothing to prevent the court from ruling on compensation directly during this criminal law proceeding," Oplatek told news server Romea.cz.

The victims’ request for financial compensation was based on an affidavit filed by a Dr. Tuček describing the impact of the traumatic experience on their psychological state. One of them is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has significantly interfered with his life. The expert witness said it was not clear whether he would ever recover from it.Members of a Romani family who were violently assaulted by racists in
the Czech town of Nýrsko at the start of August 2011 have not been
awarded compensation through the criminal courts. The District Court in
Klatovy has rejected their request and instructed them to file a civil
complaint in order to secure compensation. The state prosecutor will not
be appealing the verdict.

An inadequate verdict

The
victims’ attorney-in-fact, David Oplatek of the IN IUSTITIA
association, does not consider the court’s verdict to be correct. "It’s
not correct, the perpetrators have been convicted of a racially motivate
crime, the damage to the victims’ health was proven by medical reports
for both of them, and the non-monetary harms were also demonstrated.
There was nothing to prevent the court from ruling on compensation
directly during this criminal law proceedings," Oplatek told news server
Romea.cz.

The victims’ request for financial compensation was
based on an affidavit filed by a Dr. Tuček describing the impact of the
traumatic experience on the psychological state of those harmed. One of
them is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which has
significantly interfered with his life. The expert witness said it was
not clear whether he would ever recover from it. 

The defense
attorney for Miškovič and Boublík called the PTSD diagnosis a purely
subjective opinion and not a demonstrably tangible result of the
defendants’ behavior. The judge then said PTSD has been very well-described
and publicized lately, but he was not certain whether he could award compensation for damage to the plaintiffs’ health on the basis
of such an affidavit. 

The Romani victims would only testify in court if the defendants were not present. They are still afraid
of their attackers and said they are still experiencing the repercussions of the
assault. Long after the incident they feared the defendants would throw a
Molotov cocktail into their apartment, so they boarded up all the windows.
They were also afraid to leave the building. Miškovič and Boublík had
threatened to return and "burn them to death."

Suspended sentences

In
June of this year, the court ruled on sentencing for the two men, who were charged
with committing a racially motivated violent assault against members of
the Romani family in Nýrsko. Václav Boublík (20) and Jiří
Miškovič (23) were sentenced to 18 months in prison, suspended for three
years.
Boublík has also had his driver’s license suspended for two years. It was
already suspended when he and Miškovič assaulted the Romani family, but
he drove drunk after the assault nonetheless.

When delivering the
verdict, Judge Jan Kasal said he considered the testimony by members of
the assaulted family to be completely credible. He also said he
acknowledged the racist subtext to the defendants’ behavior as described
by the testimony of all involved, but does not believe they are
right-wing extremists.  

"The behavior of Miškovič was
influenced by alcohol and the behavior of both defendants was influenced
by their stupidity and lack of culture, but I do not believe this was
programmatic behavior influenced by hatred for people of another
nationality… I am not of the opinion that they are neo-Nazis," Kasal
said.

Rostislav Netrval, the defense attorney for the defendants,
sought a verdict of criminal innocence for his clients. He wanted the
case to be transferred to the misdemeanor commission of the municipal
authority. He based his defense on generalizations about the Romani
minority. "How has society addressed the behavior of the Romani
community? It hasn’t," he told the court.

Netrval will not be appealing the verdict; he said
his clients’ were tired of the disruption to their private lives that the trial had caused. State prosecutor Marcela Šímová also did not
appeal, as a suspended sentence had been her proposal. Attorney-in-fact
David
Oplatek did appeal on the matter of non-monetary damages
(attorneys-in-fact are not able to appeal the length of sentencing).

Oplatek also does not
believe the suspended sentences are proportionate to the crime. "The assault
was one of very high intensity, in our opinion it was attempted
grievous bodily harm. The judge did not sufficiently take into account
the conclusions of the affidavit diagnosing one of the victims with
PTSD," Oplatek told Romea.cz in June.

The assault as described
during the trial took place as follows:  The defendants first assaulted a
small group of children in a pedestrian area in Nýrsko for no reason at
all. The children began to flee and some of them ran home to hide with
their parents in a particular building. The assailants started forcing
their entry into that building and threatened to use their baseball bat
to strike a girl standing at a ground-floor window. A male resident,
fearing other assailants were on their way, opened his apartment door to see.

One of the defendants pushed
the resident to the ground and started to strangle him with a
sweatshirt. When the other members of his family saw what was happening,
they ran out and did their best to defend him. Witnesses testified that
both defendants shouted crude racial insults at the Romani people
during the assault and threatened them.

"You black swine, we came here to kill you"

"The children ran in from outside and said skinheads were chasing them. A
few moments later the doorbell rang. My niece opened the window and a
100-kg hulk with a shaved head shook his baseball bat at her from the
street. She quickly shut the window and then we heard banging on the
door," Miroslav Červeňák recalled to Romea.cz last December. He summoned all his courage and opened
the door to find out what was going on.

"I was punched the minute I opened the door. Then they grabbed me and
dragged me about 50 meters. I shouted for help. The only thing I can
remember is lying on the ground unable to breathe. They had wrapped a
sweatshirt around my throat and were pulling it tighter and tighter. I
totally lost consciousness," the 29-year-old man recalled of those
dramatic moments. His mother was the first to come to his aid.

"I grabbed the baseball bat out of the one skinhead’s hand and struck
the one who was strangling my son on the spine. It didn’t help. Míra was
completely white, his eyes were rolled back in his head and he wasn’t
moving. I was afraid they would kill him. I started to scream
hysterically," Anna Červeňáková described the sequence of events.

The family’s grandchildren woke up Anna’s husband, who also joined the
skirmish. "I jumped on the more aggressive brawler and twisted his leg
with all my strength. That helped and he let our boy go. He shouted at
us that we were ‘black swine’ and that they had come to kill us,"
Vojtěch Červeňák said. By then other members of the family were on the
scene and the balance of forces began to shift. "As soon as I regained
consciousness, I took the baseball bat from Mom and struck the assailant
who had strangled me several times in the head," Miroslav Červeňák
said.

Both assailants fled in the end, with the words "fuck ’em".
The daily
Právo reported that they got into a car accident as they made their escape.
Miškovič was unable to control the vehicle and ran into a concrete
barrier. He and his fellow passenger then fled the scene of the accident,
according to police spokesperson Dana Ladmanová. Police soon apprehended
them.

Miškovič confessed he had been driving. A breath test
showed he had almost two parts per mille
alcohol in his blood and officers discovered his license had already
been suspended. The courts had previously convicted him of rioting as
well.