Czech Justice Minister says Pardubice protest was convened illegally, attorney clarifies, Romani activist Michal Miko calls the minister's response incompetent
Czech Justice Minister Pavel Blažek has tweeted a condemnation of Sunday's protest in Pardubice by Romani community members, alleging that the gathering violated the Act on Assembly. The minister stressed that the Constitution and the laws must apply to everybody and also warned against the possible repercussions of similar events.
The assembly was convened in response to Saturday’s street brawl between Romani men and three foreign nationals alleged by some eyewitnesses to be Ukrainians, an incident that resulted in one Romani man sustaining facial injuries caused by a knife. According to the organizers of the demonstration, the Romani protesters wanted to draw attention to growing tensions between both communities and to demand security and peaceful coexistence.
Roughly 250 people assembled for the event and marched through the city. The assembly took place without any conflicts, police spokesperson Markéta Janovská said afterwards.
However, the Justice Minister said the assembly was illegal and the calls to participate in it were unlawful as well. “The assembly in Pardubice is being convened and held in violation of the Act on Assembly. Both participating in it and calling for participation in it are illegal. The Constitution and the laws must apply to everybody – ‘the majority’ and ‘minorities’. Any other approach can, over time, lead to situations like the ones we are following, for example, in France, and not just there. If the organizers, as they claim, want to draw the Government’s attention to something, they should do so lawfully,” he tweeted.
Attorney Klára Kalibová: The Act on the Right to Assembly assumes spontaneous assemblies can be held
According to the attorney and director of the In IUSTITIA organization, which aids hate crime victims, spontaneous assemblies are not illegal in and of themselves. “The Act on the Right to Assembly assumes spontaneous assemblies can be held. Gatherings of that sort usually respond to a recent event and their participants can take part in them absolutely freely, without any fear whatsoever of being prosecuted by the state. At the same time, however, their convenors do come into conflict with the law and may, under certain conditions, face a fine from the administrative body,” Kalibová told Romea.cz.
“In any specific case, it will then be a matter of solving the question of whether the situation at issue was so necessary that it needed to be solved by convening a public assembly and therefore violating the Act on the Right of Assembly or not, and as far as an assembly convened spontaneously is concerned, the rights and responsibilities involved with such an assembly are identical to the rights and responsibilities involved with an assembly that has been properly announced to the authorities, which means that the assembly must not aim to commit violence, it must not aim to provoke animosity, it must not aim to break any laws, and it must not aim to commit a gross disturbance of the peace,” Kalibová told news server Romea.cz.
Michal Miko: Blažek shows his incompetence yet again
Kalibová said Blažek’s response was quite unfortunate. “What one must expect from the representatives of the Czech state is that they will calm a situation of interethnic tension, not support it,” she said.
Michal Miko, director of the RomanoNet umbrella organization of pro-Roma and Romani-run NGOs, has harshly criticized the Justice Minister’s statement as well. “For the Czech Justice Ministry to victimize a peaceful march is just another demonstration of its incompetence, isn’t it the Interior Ministry that deals with the law on assembly? Why is the Justice Minister expressing a view of these incidents for a second time, and so cheaply, and why is he just declaring his white privilege and superiority?!” Miko responded to news server Romea.cz.
Blažek responded as follows: “Mr. Miko is using racial terminology, not me. I insist that the laws must be upheld by everybody, not just by the silent majority, as is currently happening, for example, in France.”
According to the minister, the Pardubice protest was not the kind of spontaneous assembly allowed by law. “The participants were apparently absolutely ‘unspontaneously’ organized to convene from all over the Czech Republic,” he wrote to ČTK.
“Compare my vocabulary to Mr. Miko’s statement and judge for yourselves which one of us uses racial terminology. There was not any ‘legal, spontaneous assembly’ happening in Pardubice. The participants were ‘unspontaneously’ organized to convene from all over the Czech Republic. If Klára Kalibová herself says such ‘convenors do come into conflict with the law,’ there’s nothing to add,” the Justice Minister subsequently tweeted.
Police intervened in Pardubice on Saturday evening during a street brawl that apparently involved 18 people. One participant in the conflict was injured and went to hospital.
Officers arrested three people at the scene. The injured party was a Romani man who subsequently received medical treatment.
The man was released from the hospital with two stitches to his face and was back home that same evening. Police are refusing to comment on the nationality of those participating in the conflict.
This is the second such incident to transpire between Romani men and men presumed to be Ukrainians in a matter of weeks in the Czech Republic. In Brno, interethnic tensions rose recently after such an incident near the Brno Reservoir during a fireworks festival as a result of which a Romani youth died.
According to information that has not been confirmed by authorities, the assailant in that case was Ukrainian, but police will only say he was a foreign national. The suspect is in custody.
