News

The Constitutional Court has ruled in favour of a young woman whose child was taken from her by the courts soon after birth. The ruling stated that the lower courts had not provided clear rationale for why the child had been put into institutionalised care. The mother had apparently had a conflict with hospital personnel after failing to attend prenatal checkups and refused to deal with state authorities or use modern means of communication. The Constitutional Court stated on Wednesday that the actions of the lower court had been excessive, as the mother was not given the chance to prove that she would be capable of caring for the child. The child has now been in institutional care for roughly a year and a circuit court will now decide whether she can be permanently entrusted to the care of her mother.

English words and phrases may be introduced in primary schools the coming years in other subjects. Experts from the Education Department of Brno’s Masaryk University are currently preparing a test project that would use English terminology in such classes as maths or geography. Teachers in trial schools will begin trying out the idea from September. The project was made possible by a 15 million crown grant from European funds and will involve 130 teachers and 2000 pupils from three regions of the Czech Republic.

Jíři Lobkowicz has told the Czech Press Agency that he opposes plans to sell Lobkowicz Palace to the German state or exchange it for another building. The Lesser Town palace currently houses the German embassy in Prague. Last year, Berlin made it clear that it would like to purchase the building and give the Czech Republic the former seat of the U.S. embassy in Berlin, which is now unused; the current Czech embassy in Berlin is in need of refurbishment. Mr Lobkowicz’s noble family considered the 18th century palace its primary seat until 1927, when it was acquired by the Czechoslovak state. He said that he understood that in modern history, especially in 1989, it became a place that went down into the memory of thousands of Germans fleeing to the West, however, history neither started nor ended in 1989.

The Czech Republic has offered to rent 14 Czech-made Aero L-159 combat aircraft to Hungary’s military. The Czech prime minister, Petr Nečas, put the proposal to his Hungarian counterpart Viktor Orban at a meeting on the sidelines of a Visegrad Four conference in Budapest on Tuesday. The Czech and Hungarian defence ministries will now hold talks on a possible deal. A number of other countries have expressed interest in the fighter planes, but to date the Czech air force is the sole operator. The firm Aero Vodochody produced 72 L-159s for the Czech military. It only uses 24 of them; the rest are in storage in hangars.