Commentary

Lucie Oračková on the death of a Romani man in Žatec: Czech Police are not protecting us

22.10.2016 9:40 Many people are outraged by the recent death of a young Romani man at a pizzeria in Žatec. Basically this is not about whether the person who died was Romani, Vietnamese or from the North Pole.  full story

Michal Miko on the death of a Romani man in Žatec: What next?

21.10.2016 19:42 Since yesterday evening I have not been able to sleep because of the situation that happened in Žatec this Tuesday. Was that act the beginning of something deeper in this society?  full story

Stanislava Ondová: I'm beginning to no longer feel safe in our Czech Republic

21.10.2016 14:01 We probably all know by now that a young father of two children has died in Žatec under very strange circumstances. According to the Czech Police, nobody is to blame for his death even though video footage recorded by a customer at the restaurant where the incident took place appears to show something else.  full story

Patrik Banga: Dear Czech Police, 27-year-olds do not just up and die

21.10.2016 12:11 Three days ago, somebody died in the town of Žatec under circumstances that are basically absolutely unclear. According to one version of what happened, the man assaulted customers in a restaurant and local police intervened against him.  full story

Commentary: Informing on the "Gypsies"

13.10.2016 10:38 On 11 October, František Ryba, chair of the Krušnohor Apartment Construction Cooperative, sent a message to the inhabitants of the town of Most through a spokesperson that they should begin informing the authorities about "Gypsies and inadaptables" if such people are bothering them as their neighbors. Ryba has traditionally always been harsh in his public statements - he does not pull his punches, insults people, and is not afraid to make racist attacks on Romani people.  full story

Commentary: In a country with almost no refugees, why are they feared?

9.10.2016 19:32 "In two towns in the east of Germany on Friday evening small groups of local residents clashed with asylum-seekers. The scuffles resulted in four people suffering slight injuries," the Deutsche Presse-Agentur reported on Saturday, 1 October.  full story

Commentary: Czechs realize "anti-Gypsy" law - stricter than during totalitarian rule - applies to them too

9.10.2016 18:20 As of 1 October an amendment to the law on misdemeanors has taken effect in the Czech Republic. Each municipality will now have to publish a decree listing the kind of behavior that qualifies as disrupting nighttime quiet.  full story

Commentary: Monothematic parties lose, but carefully-expressed bigotry wins votes in the Czech Republic

9.10.2016 17:11 Of the anti-Romani or extremist-oriented parties that ran during the regional and Senate elections this weekend, the Freedom and Direct Democracy group (Svoboda a přímá demokracie - SPD), founded by Tomio Okamura, scored the biggest success, mostly by running in coalition with the Citizens' Rights Party (SPO), which is connected to Czech President Zeman. Bigoted candidates such as Jaroslav Doubrava and Liana Janáčková made it to the second round of the Senate elections, and Jiří Čunek, running for the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL) scored a significant success in the Zlín Region.  full story

Commentary: Czech Regional and Senate elections - Roma didn't vote, Romani candidates didn't win

9.10.2016 14:15 The outcome of this weekend's elections to regional assemblies and to one-third of the Czech Senate in localities where a greater number of Romani people live did not demonstrate any significant voter preferences - rather, what was typical of those localities was a very low voter turnout. Romani candidates were not elected anywhere.  full story

Analysis: Why the National Resistance members should be tried - 10 years of a failed hunt for hardcore neo-Nazis in the Czech Republic

8.10.2016 12:20 Two weeks ago, the latest round of the court proceedings against eight defendants charged with conspiracy and rioting with the aim of promoting Nazism in the Czech Republic began. According to the indictment, the defendants are the former hard core of an unregistered group called the "National Resistance" (Národní odpor - NO).  full story

William Lazarus Bila: Roma joining the bandwagon on anti-refugee campaigns

6.10.2016 10:27 I am angry and disappointed. Despite the recent Hungarian Migrant Quota Referendum being deemed invalid and not succeeding in obtaining enough voter participation to have any significant meaning, the Hungarian Prime Minister and his followers have already begun spinning this failure into a success story for the delusional and uninformed. We need to stop this, for Europe.  full story

Commentary: Corporal punishment at the "inclusive school"

4.10.2016 15:12 Recently I have been repeatedly asked to write something about inclusive education. The debate about this topic has become extremely polarized and I have not been able to figure out which end of the spectrum to start from if I want to avoid repeating arguments I have heard 100 times and adding fuel to the fire already burning around this subject.  full story

US Professor Ian Hancock on the Miss Roma competition: Romani girls do not need to sell their beauty

26.9.2016 21:21 The finale of the 16th annual competition "Miss Czechoslovak Roma", which was held on Saturday, 24 September in the Czech town of Hodonín, prompted many different reactions. In addition to commentaries on social networking sites, Petr Uhl published a critical article about the Romani beauty contest on news server Romea.cz.  full story

Miroslav Kováč: Longtime racist politician hands out matches during Czech elections

26.9.2016 12:49 Liana Janáčková is a former Senator and longtime Mayor of the Municipal Department of Mariánské Hory in the City of Ostrava who is primarily infamous for her blatantly extremist position toward the Romani minority, and she is running for the Senate again this year. This time around she is running for the INDEPENDENTS (NEZÁVISLÍ) movement in the Ostrava-město precinct, while at the same time, in the elections to the Regional Authority, she is heading the candidate list for that movement in the Moravian-Silesian Region.  full story

Commentary: A children's playground, common dialogue, and the media

25.9.2016 20:54 In mid-September the Lidové noviny daily paper opened up an important topic by publishing a sketch of an everyday experience at a children's playground in the Czech Republic. What followed was a passionate discussion about whether the article itself was inciting racism or whether it was analyzing the causes of racism, whether a person should "speak up" in certain situations or leave them in tears.  full story

Commentary: The Miss Roma competition does more harm than good

25.9.2016 18:29 On Saturday evening the "Miss Roma 2016" competition was held at the House of Culture in the Czech town of Hodonín for the 12th year in a row. I have always had mixed feelings about this contest, but I have never before publicly discussed what bothers me about it because it was always clear to me that it involves a significant emancipatory charge for some Romani community members.  full story

Eva Danišová: Czech society has already crossed the line between intolerance and racism

21.9.2016 18:48 On 16 September 2016, the Office of the Czech Government Council for Romani Minority Affairs and the Secretariat of the Czech Government Council on National Minorities held a training on the principles of community work and development of the skills necessary for negotiating with local governments. The training was attended by Romani representatives who negotiate with the local authorities in the places where they work and also in the socially excluded localities in which they move.  full story

Commentary: Czech "hero" reports the racist news from a children's playground

20.9.2016 8:00 The Czech media panopticum has offered consumers a lot recently: Olivie Žižková and her man filming themselves during attacks of paranoia on mass transit in Prague, the "schizophrenic Barbie" running for office with her untreated Messiah complex - and now there's another. An editor at the newspaper Lidové Noviny, Přemysl Houda, has written a column called "Playground Racism" in which he laments an episode he recently experienced between the playground slides.  full story

Commentary: Schizophrenic "Barbie" running for ultra-right party claims to be shocked by backlash against her support for Romani arson victim

18.9.2016 8:20 The Czech celebrity Dominika Myslivcová is "Barbie". At least, that's the nickname given to her by the readers of Czech tabloids.  full story

Miroslav Klempár: Parents make the final decision on where to enroll their children for school

17.9.2016 13:24 In the former communist Czechoslovakia of the late 1950s, the Government decided that Romani people were different from the rest of society and should therefore be educated separately. This differentiation on the basis of race led to today's two-track school system, in which a high-quality education is offered by mainstream schools where mostly non-Romani children are educated, and Romani children are disproportionately represented in what were once called the "zvláštní školy" (special schools) where a reduced education is offered for children who have mild mental disability.  full story