Employer found guilty of racist discrimination

An employer who refused to offer Mr. Pavel Sarissky a job, on the grounds of his ethnicity, has been ordered to apologise and fined 50 thousand CZK (2,500 USD) by a Prague court. Ms. Nada Mihailova, the owner of IMAGE-n-west, was found guilty of racist discrimination against Mr. Sarissky, and ordered to pay damages. When Pavel Sarissky applied for a job in her firm in 2005, she rejected his application - telling the employment bureau that it was because he was unwilling to work nights. Mr. Sarissky refuted the allegations, producing a reference from his previous employer as evidence. Ms. Mihailova responded to this by telling Mr. Sarissky that she 'just didn't employ Romanies'. According to the European Monitoring Centre in Vienna, discrimination against the Roma minority in the Czech Republic is widespread, though this is only one of a couple of cases of discrimination in the workplace to have made it to Czech courts.