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Slovak Police investigating suspicions of vote-buying in Romani settlements

15.3.2016 17:49 Police in Slovakia are investigating whether vote-buying has occurred in two Romani settlements in eastern Slovakia, where two lesser-known candidates for the governing party Směr-Sociální Demokracie (Direction-Social Democracy - Směr-SD), Peter Chudík and Stanislav Kubánek, won many more preferential votes than Slovak PM Robert Fico, the party's chair and most popular politician. Parliamentary elections were held in Slovakia more than a week ago.  full story

Czech Republic: Museum of Romani Culture holds commemorative ceremony on anniversary of genocide of Bohemian and Moravian Roma

14.3.2016 19:48 A commemorative ceremony marking the first mass transport of Romani men, women and children from the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to the Auschwitz concentration camp was held last week in Brno. The trains to Auschwitz set out on 7 March 1943 from the local municipally-run animal slaughterhouses.  full story

videoVideo footage shows recently-elected Slovak MP attacking Arab family including children last year

14.3.2016 18:41 Milan Mazurek (age 22) is a violent racist who will be seated in the Slovak Parliament on behalf of Marian Kotleba's fascist party, the People's Party Our Slovakia (Lidová strana Naše Slovensko - LSNS), as was documented last year when he vulgarly shouted at an Arab family with children who were being protected by police officers when extremists began throwing rocks at them during an anti-immigrant demonstration in Bratislava. Mazurek will be seated instead of the originally-elected LSNS candidate, who has had to give up his Parliamentary seat because he is being prosecuted for having assaulted a dark-skinned foreign national in 2014.  full story

Czech Republic: 1 200 local Holocaust victims commemorated in Tábor

14.3.2016 18:07 A commemorative ceremony today in the South Bohemian town of Tábor honored the approximately 1 200 people from the area who did not survive the Holocaust during the Second World War. The event, called REMEMBER! (PAMATUJ!) was held at the Church of Saint Philip and Jacob and at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Tábor, Jakub Smrčka of the Hadasa Tábor civic association, which organized the event, told the Czech News Agency.  full story

Czech Interior Ministry appealing municipal decision on gallows at anti-refugee hate demonstration

13.3.2016 19:07 The Czech Interior Ministry is appealing a municipal decision finding that those who brought mock-ups of gallows to a demonstration last year did not commit any wrongdoing. Prague City Hall will now be addressing the dispute.  full story

Germany: Neo-Nazis and populists march in Berlin waving fake Third Reich flags and those of Russia

13.3.2016 0:46 Almost 3 000 right-wing extremists and populists marched through the center of Berlin today to express their disagreement with the German Government's migration policy and more than 1 000 people turned out to counter-protest them. Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) reports that smaller clashes occurred with police when approximately 200 people attempted to blockade the extremists' march.  full story

UK: It is a crime to curse someone for being English

12.3.2016 20:52 Allusions to someone's origin or religion can be considered racist in Great Britain. A court in the town of Hull has recently found a man guilty for using the term "English" to insult a traffic warden during an argument over a parking ticket.  full story

Czech activists file report of suspected crime after officials fail to produce permit used as pretext for denying them access to facility

11.3.2016 23:29 Activists running the Autonomous Social Center Klinika in the Žižkov quarter of Prague 3 say they have filed a report of a suspected crime with the police over the fact that the Prague 3 Building Works Authority claimed to them and to the owner of the facility where their center has been operating that because the building had been issued a permit for a different use, the continued operation of the center there was illegal. Now it turns out there is no record of such a use permit.  full story

Austria: Arson attacks against Romani families from Romania

11.3.2016 20:38 Unidentified perpetrators set fire to the tents of Romani families from Romania in the Upper Austrian city of Linz at the beginning of March. Fortunately, no one was injured in that incident.  full story

UN Committee tells Czech Republic: Compensate victims of forced sterilization and punish those responsible

11.3.2016 17:49 For the purpose of improving the position of women in the Czech Republic, the UN Committee for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) issued its Concluding Observations to the Czech Republic on 7 March, based on the Czech Government's Sixth Periodic Report to the Committee on upholding the UN Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination against Women. A delegation from the Czech Republic defended that report before the Committee in Geneva on 23 February.  full story

Czech Police say they did not make a mistake when they failed to act against Nazi chants at public gathering

10.3.2016 20:52 The Czech Police did not make a mistake when they did not intervene against supporters of Czech President Miloš Zeman who chanted the slogans "Nothing but the nation" and "Pure race" last year on 17 November during a demonstration in Prague. Ivana Nguyenová, spokesperson for the Czech Police Presidium, has given that answer in response to a question posed by the Czech News Agency.  full story

Czech Constitutional Court receives motion to abolish inclusion in amendment to Schools Act

10.3.2016 18:03 The Czech Constitutional Court has received a proposal for the abolition of the planned inclusion that has been anchored in an amendment to the Schools Act adopted last year. As of 1 September this year, children with mild mental disability are to be gradually included into the classes of mainstream primary schools and to have special conditions for their instruction provided there for their education.  full story

Editorial: Czech Senator publishes untruths in defense of segregated school

10.3.2016 16:24 At the close of February, the Czech School Inspection (Česká školní inspekce - ČŠI) published its inspection report from its monitoring of the Primary School in the town of Krásná Lípa. In September 2015, Romani parents there had complained that their children had been concentrated into a single class.  full story

Czech prosecutor said Amnesty International report about discrimination of Roma in schools was "pseudo-research"

9.3.2016 19:07 The Czech daily Právo published a news item today citing an official notification released by State Prosecutor Zdeňka Galková last year in the matter of a report of suspected criminal behavior filed against the leadership of Amnesty International (AI) by the head of the Department of Education and European Funds at the Prague 9 municipal department, Martin Odehnal, who was previously the director of the Special Education Department at the Czech Education Ministry. Odehnal contacted police because of an AI report published last year called "Must Try Harder - Ethnic Discrimination of Romani Children in Czech Schools" ("Chce to více snahy - Etnická diskriminace romských dětí v českých školách").  full story

Czech activists and local opposition council members want proof of building's use permit, officials stall

8.3.2016 23:52 The governing coalition leading the Prague 3 Municipal Department did not approve the agenda item for today's council meeting, which was convened by opposition members of the council to address the issue of the Autonomous Social Center Klinika in the Žižkov quarter. In a tense atmosphere, the councilors spent more than two hours discussing whether to approve the agenda item and would not allowed the activists present to address the council during regular session.  full story

Czech Police investigating squatting of building by the Klinika Social Center

8.3.2016 17:14 The Prague 3 Municipal Council will be meeting to discuss the Autonomous Social Center Klinika. The session was convened by opposition members of the council who support the activists behind Klinika remaining at the facility in the Žižkov quarter.  full story

Slovakia: Thousands protest Kotleba and clerical fascism in Bratislava

7.3.2016 23:40 Slovak Police say more than 1 000 people assembled today in the center of Bratislava before marching through the streets of the capital to protest the ultra-right party of Marian Kotleba, the People's Party Our Slovakia (LSNS), which scored gains in parliamentary elections this past weekend. The march was gradually joined by others and organizers estimate it reached between 2 000 and 3 000 people by the time it ended.  full story

Czech Republic should consider Nazi electoral gains in Slovakia a warning

7.3.2016 22:12 The election results in Slovakia this past weekend have sparked a great deal of response beyond the country's borders and have been commented on by Czech politicians and by Czech and international media. The elections overall were won by the Social Democratic party of Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico, Směr–SD, but compared to the elections four years ago, that party has suffered significant losses in terms of its share of the electorate, and has lost its majority in the unicameral legislature.  full story

Czech Green Party chair describes hateful verbal assault on Prague public transport

5.3.2016 21:34 It's happened to me twice now, within a very short amount of time. I get on the tram, take a seat, and suddenly behind me, from the rear platform, someone starts yelling this to the whole tram car: "That's the creep who's inviting Muslims to our country to rape our Czech women, I'm telling everybody here, that's Matěj Stropnický, look at him" (the whole tram turns to look and a couple of people laugh at me) "the shame of our nation! What are you doing, you motherfucker? You wanna take me? Come on, get out, let's go!" (by now the tram is absolutely silent and, what's more, we're in a traffic jam).  full story

Analysis: Czech Police are confusing lawful behavior with "left-wing extremism"

4.3.2016 18:55 In September 1998, 17 years ago, the Antifa initiative held a march in the Czech city of Brno under the slogan "Blacks, whites, let's unite!" and "Why see difference when nothing divides us?!" The organizer of that march, Dušan Rosenbaum, said at the close of the demonstration that racism and fascism were more than just a problem for Jews, Roma and other persons of color here, but had also become a problem for LGBT people, those living with disabilities, ethnic minorities, humanists and human rights defenders: "Let's prevent conflict arising from natural human diversity, whether it be ethnic, cultural, national, racial or sexual," he warned.  full story