Constitutional court president gave suspended sentence to youth attempting to emigrate in 1985

In 1985, when he was a judge in the Pilsen District Court, Josef Baxa, now the President of the Constitutional Court, handed out a two-year suspended sentence to a seventeen-year-old man for attempting to emigrate, news site Novinky.cz revealed on Monday. Novinky looked through the archive of over 3,000 cases that Baxa handled between 1984 and 1989 and came to the conclusion that this was the only case that appeared to have a political undertone. Baxa told the Czech News Agency that he welcomed the fact that journalists had reviewed his pre-1989 verdicts.

Due to media pressure over his pre-1989 career in the judiciary, another candidate for the Constitutional Court, Robert Fremr, gave up his nomination in mid-August. In an interview that Baxa gave to the Czech News Agency at the time, he said that the public debate about how the communist justice system worked was valuable, but it had come too late. He also warned against viewing the past through a black-and-white lens.

When asked about his own pre-1989 past, he said he had worked mostly on cases dealing with general crime and did not remember emigrant cases, but admitted that there might have been one. However, he said that he could not be sure without going through the archives himself, as he had handed out verdicts in dozens of cases a month while serving at the District Court in Pilsen.