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11/27/2019
The European Parliament approved the new European Commission with an overwhelming majority on Wednesday. The vote means not only that the team in charge of the European executive branch has been established for the next five years, but it is also the first time that one of its vice-presidents, Věra Jourová, will be Czech. Ms Jourová, who is in charge of the values and transparency portfolio, tweeted shortly after the vote that this was “a strong signal that Europe is ready to take a leadership role in the current challenges”.
Her tweet echoed the speech by future commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who said that Europe can shape the global order in a speech that put climate change and migration at the heart of her strategy.
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11/27/2019
The digitisation of the Czech Republic’s public administration is progressing too slowly and is still well below the EU average, according to a new report by the Supreme Audit Office, published on Wednesday. Auditors see slow progress in legal changes and the overall fractured nature of related legislation as the main reasons, but problems related to a lack of experts and out of date information systems have also been highlighted.
Successive Czech governments spent CZK 75 billion on eGovernment from 2012 to 2018 and the digitisation of public administration is one of the key targets set out by the current government manifesto. However, last year only 26 percent of people used such online services.
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11/27/2019
Taxi service rules in the Czech Republic are likely to change in favour of alternative carriers after the Chamber of Deputies voted in favour of an amendment to the Road Transport Act, despite strong lobbying by the Czech Association of Taxi Drivers against the change, the Czech News Agency reported on Wednesday.
The legislation counts on abolishing the requirement of every taxi having a taximeter, with a simple app sufficing instead. In addition such cars will not be required to have a taxi designation fitted on their roofs. Districts will lose their right to set colour and size rules on the service providers’ vehicles.
The legislation is yet to be approved by the Senate and signed by the president.
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11/27/2019
Wednesday is the 30th anniversary of a general strike that represented a significant turning point in the Velvet Revolution. Between noon and 2 pm on November 27, 1989 a reported 75 percent of Czechoslovakia’s workforce took part in the symbolic action, which helped confirm the legitimacy of the Civic Forum opposition grouping and was another nail in the coffin of Communist Party rule. Just over a month later dissident writer Václav Havel was elected president.
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11/27/2019
The Czech Republic achieved its main aims after the Velvet Revolution relatively quickly by joining NATO and the EU, the country’s minister of foreign affairs, Tomáš Petříček, said at a public debate in Prague. However, the country is now facing a challenge as to how to handle its full-fledged membership of those international organisations, he said.
Mr. Petříček said the Czech Republic needed to define the “small steps” by which it would proceed further within the Western community and to learn to defend its views in Europe and not be frustrated by having to make compromises.
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11/26/2019
Leaders of opposition parties in the Chamber of Deputies praised the work of the BIS counterintelligence service after it released a report highlighting the activities of disseminators of pro-Russian disinformation in the Czech Republic.
The head of the Mayors and Independents group, Jan Farský, said, however, that the work of the counterintelligence was being complicated by President Miloš Zeman, who has repeatedly refused to promote BIS chief Michal Koudelka to the rank of general.
Mr. Zeman’s spokesperson, Jiří Ovčáček, said it was wrong of BIS to dub those with alternative outlooks as peddlers of disinformation. He said this was an attack on free speech.
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11/26/2019
The former athlete Roman Šebrle is offering CZK 100,000 for help in finding the gold medal he won in the decathlon at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. Šebrle, who turned 45 on Tuesday, said he lost the medal – his only Olympic gold – three years ago.
Now a TV presenter, Šebrle was also crowned world champion, in 2007, and was a two-time European champion. He also held the world points record for the decathlon for several years.
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11/26/2019
Wednesday should be cloudy and wet with daytime highs of up to 7 degrees Celsius. Similar weather is expected in the following days, though temperatures should climb slightly.
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11/26/2019
The Czech police’s Office for the Documentation of the Crimes of Communism have initiated the prosecution of three senior figures from the pre-1989 Communist regime. One-time Communist Party general secretary Miloš Jakeš, former prime minister Lubomír Štrougal and ex-interior minister Vratislav Vajnar are accused of abuse of office in connection with the use of firearms on the borders of the then Czechoslovakia, a representative of the Prague 1 state attorney’s office, Jan Lelek, said on Tuesday.
The three top Communists were aware the border patrol service were using guns to shoot people crossing the border without authorisation but did nothing to stop them, Mr. Lelek said.
The Office for the Documentation of the Crimes of Communism said that because of the inaction of the three officials between 1976 and 1989 nine people were either shot dead or killed by dogs while attempting to cross the border into the West; at least seven others were injured.
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11/26/2019
The spreading of disinformation by pro-Russian activists was the most serious threat to the constitutionality of the Czech Republic last year, the country’s BIS counterintelligence service says in an annual report issued on Tuesday.
In recent years such players have been agitating in an increasingly intensive and systematic way against the political structure in the Czech Republic and the country’s membership of the EU and NATO, the report states.
The report says those circulating pro-Moscow disinformation tend to be from various nationalist and populist movements and include parties and individuals. Some of them were previously active in the domestic anti-immigrant movement.
BIS also said that China was intensifying its espionage activities in the Czech Republic, with all of it main intelligence services in operation here in 2018.
China has targeted its activities at the academic community, the security forces and the state administration and has sought to recruit Czechs as agents, the report says.
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