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A Czech court of appeal has sent the former finance minister Ivo Svoboda and his close aide Barbora Snopkova to five years in prison for fraud. They were found guilty of having unlawfully transferred 6.5 million crowns to their own private companies from the now bankrupt pram manufacturer Liberta while they were on its board of directors. Svoboda is the first former cabinet minister to be served a prison sentence since the fall of communism.

The Czech Foreign Ministry has urged the release of an Azeri national who has been granted political asylum in the Czech Republic. Professor Sadai Nazarov, an aide to the former Azeri prime minister Sarat Huseynov, fled to the Czech Republic in the mid 1990's after the regime of president Heydar Aliyev accused Huseynov of planning a coup. He was granted political asylum three years later. Nazarov was arrested in Azerbaijan several days ago on a visit to his homeland. The Czech Foreign Ministry has called for "a humanitarian approach and a speedy resolution to the case", stressing that Nazarov is under the Czech Republic's protection.

The United States has criticized the Czech military for buying an artillery radar and a mobile anti-aircraft missile complex without a tender. According to the daily Hospodarske Noviny the US embassy in Prague sent the Czech Defence Ministry a letter expressing concern about the purchases. A Defence Ministry spokesperson said the purchases had been made without a tender since the law on public orders did not require one. The choice was reportedly made on the recommendation of a team of experts.

The former Czech president Vaclav Havel has again spoken out strongly against recent moves taken by the European Union to normalise diplomatic relations with Cuba. In an open letter published on Monday in a leading Czech daily, Mr Havel said that the EU had entered into a "shameful deal" that "spit on all the principles" of democracy and human rights espoused in the draft EU constitution. The EU froze diplomatic relations with Cuba in June 2003 after some 75 dissidents were arrested and sentenced to up to 28 years in prison. But in recent months, Cuba has re-established contacts with EU member states, after they agreed to stop inviting Cuban dissidents to official embassy events. The communist island nation first re-established contact with its closest ally, Spain, and finally with those most hostile to the Cuban regime: the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland, as well as the EU as a whole. Vaclav Havel, himself a former dissident who was imprisoned many times by communist officials, is the founder of the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, an organisation that supports the families of Cuban dissidents.