Patrik Kotlár is breaking down stereotypes inside the Vlax Romani community of the Czech Republic. He is in his third year at the High School of Management and Law in Brno, where he is focusing on Security Law.

Like any Romani person, I have sometimes had to go through difficult situations. Especially at primary school, where my brother and I were subjected to racist remarks from other students day in and day out.

Shortly afer Romea.cz published a recent report about an audio recording capturing an example of a practice engaged in by landlords in the Czech Republic who, in violation of the law, a priori refuse to lease their apartment units to prospective tenants because they are of Romani origin, our editors received another audio recording of such an interaction. This new recording is of a telephone coversation between Miroslav Brož, a social worker, and an unnamed employee (probably a secretary) of a real estate company in Teplice.

On Friday the Czech newspaper Mladá fronta DNES published a special insert on the use of capital and lower-case letters in the Czech language as part of its regular series on Czech grammar, and the autor included the word "gypsy" (cikán) as one of the examples. For the time being we will not discuss whether or not this word should be capitalized.

Amnesty International (AI) finds the approach taken by the authorities toward investigating charges of police violence from 2013 in the Romani community living on Budulovská Street in Moldava nad Bodvou, Slovakia to be unjust. AI believes the authorities' handling of this case has violated binding international treaties on human rights.

In a press release issued on 14 September, Czech Christian Democratic MEPs Pavel Svoboda, Michaela Šojdrová and Tomáš Zdechovský announced that they have filed criminal charges against Czech MP Tomio Okamura, whose election campaign is called "The Courage to Speak the Truth" and who has disseminated a deceptive list of the names of 12 MEPs whom he is alleging voted at the European Parliament (EP) in favor of sanctions against the Czech Republic because the country decided not to receive refugees as part of the EU's quota system. All three of the Christian Democratic MEPs can prove that they voted against the resoution Okamura is referring to.

The practice of some property owners treating prospective Romani tenants arbitrarily has been documented by news server Romea.cz more than once. This past July we reported on the CEO of the A Property firm, Ondřej Opletal, who made the illegal decision to evict Nikola Holubová, a Romani mother of three, onto the street from one day to the next in Prague.