Czech Justice Minister will not discipline state prosecutor accused of protecting racists

Nine months ago the online daily Deník Referendum (DR) filed a motion with the Czech Justice Ministry for disciplinary proceedings to begin against Prague 1 District Attorney JUDr. Zdeňka Galková. Czech Justice Minister Robert Pelikán rejected that motion on 7 February.

The minister’s response to the complaint was that “no reason to file a disciplinary motion was given.” It did not elaborate.

The DR editors filed the motion because they are convinced that Galková “as a State Prosecutor is not following the applicable legal code, in particular, the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms, and is influenced by prejudice in her practice, taking a selective approach to cases by applying different standards according to the ethnicity, political beliefs or religion of those involved.” DR documented its accusations by describing seven concrete cases that its reporters have written about in detail.

Those cases include Galková’s protection of antisemitic speech made by the Slovak nationalist Marián Magát, her tolerance for the bullying speech by Adam B. Bartoš and Tomio Okamura during a demonstration featuring mockups of a gallows, her allowing the openly racist website white-media.info to be used as a source of evidence, and her inflammatory (and unsubstantiated) criticism of research by Amnesty International (AI) into the discrimination of Romani pupils in the Czech Republic’s schools. The minister, however, has expressed himself concretely only about the AI case, according to DR, stating that “the state attorney has been accused of adding her own excessive, inappropriate, personal evaluation of the truthfulness of the report by Amnesty International to what was an otherwise accurate conclusion. That error has been discussed with the District Attorney for Prague 1.”

That allegedly “otherwise accurate conclusion” was Galková’s assertion that the Czech schools do not commit discrimination against Romani children on the basis of their ethnicity. While the minister’s justification of his decision also describes the procedure for assessing the motion, DR has asked the minister to provide more detail on each point of the motion and to more clearly justify its rejection.