News

Labour costs in the Czech Republic grew in the fourth quarter of 2009 by more than almost any other EU country. Eurostat reported on Wednesday that hourly labour costs in the country had gone up by up 5.4% compared to the same period in 2008. Only Bulgaria, Austria and Poland showed higher growth, with 11.3, 6.5 and 5.7%, respectively. Growth of labour costs was negative in the other countries for which there is information available, primarily in Lithuania, where it fell by nearly 11%. Eurostat showed the average growth in the EU at 2.4% and in the Euro-zone at 2.2% year on year.

Former president Václav Havel has publicly endorsed the Green Party for parliamentary elections in May. In a letter entitled “We Choose the Green Party”, Mr Havel and dozens of other intellectuals wrote that Czech politics needed “green” politicians untouched by corruption scandals who would not abuse the public coffers or restrict the freedom of the media. President Havel also supported the Green Party in last year’s elections to the European Parliament. Their results in that poll were poor, in part due to the break-up of the coalition government of which they were a part. Current polls show she Green Party hovering around the 5% margin needed to win a parliamentary mandate.

The Office for Personal Data Protection has fined the State Institute for Drug Control 2.3 million crowns for collecting sensitive data on patients. The institute was found to have recorded data from personal prescriptions without permission and to have failed to have stored the information in a secure way. The office has called the case the largest collection of illegally obtained data it had ever encountered, with 200,000 drug prescriptions filed a day for a period of six months. The database was established at a cost of 170 million crowns and was originally intended to combat the production of narcotics and protect patients from inappropriate combinations of medicines.

The Czech Medical Chamber is preparing an official apology for its participation in creating an order to ban Jews from working in medical professions. The order was enforced in 1938. The chamber’s board will discuss the apology on Thursday and the president of the Czech Medical Chamber Milan Kubík said that he feels confident it will be approved. The Czech Bar Association, which had also ordered that Jews be banned from legal professions, already issued an official apology last year. The order was published a mere two days after the Munich agreement and was instrumental in marginalizing the Czech Jewish population and stripping it of its democratic freedoms.