News

Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla confirmed speculation on Wednesday that the Social Democratic Party, the senior ruling coalition partner, wants to see Milos Kuzvart in the European Commission. Mr Kuzvart, a current MP and former environment minister is therefore most likely to become the Czech Republic's EC representative. According to Mr Spidla, the 43-year old candidate is most suitable for the post as he speaks English and is already an active member of the environment and agriculture committees in the Council of Europe. However, not all parliamentary parties share Mr Spidla's view. Bedrich Moldan, the opposition right-of-centre Civic Democrats' shadow environment minister, and Ivana Janu, a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia have also been named.

The International Monetary Fund has criticised the Czech Republic for continuing shortcomings in the judicial and legal systems and for weaknesses in corporate governance. In its Report on the Observance of Standards and Codes released on Monday, the International Monetary Fund or IMF said Czech courts suffered from insufficient resources and lack of wider experience among the judges in understanding modern business law and corporate finance. Other problems, stated by the IMF, include costly, cumbersome and non-transparent court proceedings. According to the IMF, slow court proceedings lead to significant backlog of filed and pending bankruptcy cases and weak legal protection of creditors' rights.

An elderly man blamed for a five-year string of bombings and bomb threats across the Czech Republic has died of self-inflicted wounds. Police said the 68-year-old retired locksmith died on Sunday in a Prague hospital from stab wounds to the neck. The man, whose name was withheld, had tried to kill himself while being arrested on December 29 near a memorial to Germans expelled from the former Czechoslovakia after World War II. The memorial in the northern town of Teplice nad Metuji was damaged by a bomb last spring. The memorial bombing had been one of 18 unsolved incidents since March 1999 that police thought might be the work of a single attacker.

A Czech humanitarian aid convoy has arrived in Bam, southern Iran where it will spend around ten days helping quake victims. The convoy of three off-road vehicles and nine volunteer workers have brought power generators, medical supplies, disinfectants and water-purification tablets. They will be giving aid directly to the survivors, travelling outside Bam to remote villages. The convoy is being assisted by representatives of the Iranian Red Crescent.