Slovakia: Anti-fascists ask Prosecutor-General to dissolve ultra-right party

The organizers of the anti-fascist march in the center of Bratislava on 7 March against the ultra-right party called "Kotleba - People's Party Our Slovakia" (LSNS), which was attended by as many as 3 000 people after the party scored victories in the Parliamentary elections, are now calling for the LSNS to be dissolved. They have delivered a letter to Jaromír Čižnár, the Prosecutor-General of the Slovak Republic, asking him to take advantage of his powers and file a motion with the Slovak Supreme Court for Kotleba's party to be dissolved.

That could happen if the Prosecutor were to assess the LSNS activities and program as unconstitutional. Even if the court were to ultimately dissolve the party, however,its members would still hold the offices they have been elected to, because Slovak law has no options available for removing them from office.

Kotleba's party is considered so far-right as to be a neo-Nazi party. More than 200 000 voters cast ballots for it during the recent parliamentary elections.

The LSNS won 8 % of the vote and holds 14 seats in Parliament now. According to Andrea Predajňová, the press spokesperson for the Prosecutor-General, 160 requests for the dissolution of Kotleba's party have been sent to the office.

"Despite the fact that the LSNS made it into Parliament on Saturday in a formally democratic way, it is not a democratic party. The LSNS is the moral follower of and admirer of the criminal WWII-era Slovak State, which murdered 60 000 people for its perverted ideology," said Matej Ivančík of the Human Rights Institute.

A party founded by Kotleba has been dissolved once before, in 2006, when the Slovak Supreme Court dissolved his group called "Slovak Solidarity - National Party", the program of which proposed overturning democracy and establishing a corporate state based on Christian, national and social principles. That was the very first time a political party had ever been dissolved in the history of the country.