Czech Police charge man who insulted minorities online, he faces up to three years if convicted
News server Novinky.cz reports that the Czech Police have charged a 32-year-old man from Prostějov for authoring posts on social networking sites at the close of last year and the start of 2017 in two different discussions about current events during which he grossly insulted national minorities. František Kořínek, spokesperson for the Czech Police, told the daily Právo of the charges on Friday, 12 May.
If convicted, the man faces up to three years in prison. “In the discussions, among other things, he posted material motivated by racial intolerance that targeted national minorities,” the police spokesperson told Novinky.cz.
“The author of the posts expressed himself about these groups using exceptionally gross expressions and threatened to destroy them,” Kořínek told Novinky.cz. “Detectives in Prostějov have managed to ascertain the identity of the author of the posts.”
“The man subsequently confessed to having authored them,” the police spokesperson has informed Novinky.cz. Police officers have charged the man with committing violence against a group of inhabitants and its individual members, with making dangerous threats, with defamation of an ethnic, national, racial or other group, and with inciting hatred against a group or inciting the restriction of the rights and freedoms of members of the group.
The minimum sentence possible if the man is convicted of incitement in particular would be six months, with the maximum sentence possible being three years, according to the police spokesperson. At the end of 2016 the Czech courts acted with lightning speed to convict in cases of defamation in which the perpetrators were Romani.
In December 2016 the District Court in Louny sent 41-year-old Miroslav Fedák to prison for eight months because he shouted racist, vulgar abuse during an assembly held after a young Romani man died at a pizzeria in the presence of police under circumstances that have yet to be satisfactorily explained. Prior to that, the same court sent 20-year-old Vladimír Kudráč to prison for four months for making dangerous threats.
Using the Facebook social networking site, Kudráč had threatened to shoot the chef at the pizzeria where the Romani man died. At the beginning of this year the ROMEA organization filed more than 10 criminal reports of similar racist remarks with the Czech Police.
Police have not responded to any of them and have not informed the ROMEA organization as to how they are handling the reports. The ROMEA organization intends to file a complaint against the police inaction in those cases.
