Czech court gives Slovak neo-Nazi six month suspended sentence for hate speech

Today the Teplice District Court handed down a criminal injunction against a 62-year-old man from Slovakia for a speech he gave on Saturday in Krupka during a rally for the Workers’ Social Justice Party (Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti – DSSS). The court said his speech incited hatred against members of a particular ethnicity. News server Novinky.cz reports that the man left the court with a six month sentence suspended for two years and promised to leave the Czech Republic as quickly as possible.

Presiding judge Roman Dobeš told the Czech Press Agency that the court also confiscated some of the man’s property – a t-shirt, a baseball cap, and a badge, all of which displayed banned Nazi symbols. The man also has the eagle of the Third Reich tattooed on his body. However, Dobeš said the court could not punish the man for wearing the symbols, as he had kept them covered up during the rally.

Promoters of the extreme right demonstrated in the streets of Krupka (population 15 000) on Saturday. By marching, they allegedly wanted to draw attention to an incident that took place there not quite one year ago, when two young Roma men brutally beat and raped a 12-year-old [non-Roma] boy. The first-instance court sent one of the assailants to prison for 10 years, but an appeals court reduced the sentence by half. Both courts found the attack was racially motivated. The second assailant could not be criminally prosecuted as he was not yet 15 years old when he committed the crime.

At the entrance to the Maršov housing estate, where a large number of Roma people live in Krupka, the DSSS march was blocked by a group of more than 200 Roma people and chaplains leading prayers who refused to obey police orders to disperse. After several dozen minutes of tense waiting, police units dispersed the worshipers using stun grenades and truncheons. There were 700 officers deployed for the entire event.

According to Miroslav Brož, spokesperson for the “We Don’t Want Neo-Nazis in Ústí!” Initiative, which organized the counter-demonstration, organizers are now preparing to take several legal steps against the police, including a constitutional complaint and filing suit in administrative court. Brož believes that in a democratic state it is not possible for police to disperse people who are praying together. Joel Ruml, chair of the Ecumenical Council of Churches, has also condemned the police intervention.