Czech Republic to pay one million crowns in damages in police brutality case

The Czech Republic, represented by the Interior Ministry, is to pay one million crowns in damages to the 18-year-old son of a Vietnamese man who died in 2009 following a brutal police raid in Brno. The decision was announced on Tuesday by Brno’s Municipal Court Judge Jan Sedláček. The son as well as the wife of the deceased had sought 50 million crowns in damages each. In his decision, the judge explained that Czech law did not recognise exemplary sentences, which ruled out such significant damages. The judge instead relied on an existing benchmark but raised the sum of 240,000 crowns usually paid out in such cases. He said he had raised the amount given the father’s level of suffering and the fact that his son had lost his father at the age of just 14.