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Mr Klaus has also called on the Czech Foreign Ministry to begin fresh talks with the Vatican on a treaty between the Czech Republic and the Holy See. The president said he would reject the current proposed inter-state agreement, as the Chamber of Deputies did last year. A spokesman for Foreign Minister Svoboda, who is a member of the Christian Democrats, said the minister was planning to put the current wording before parliament again.

The Czech Supreme Administrative Court has made three separate rulings in which environmentalists are to gain access to any information concerning the controversial Temelin nuclear power plant in southern Bohemia. Czech environmentalists took the State Office for Nuclear Safety (SUJB) to court, after a several year-long unsuccessful battle for information including the power plant's safety plans, accident plans, and recorded technical faults.

A court in Prague has ruled that Dagmar Havlova, the sister-in-law of former Czech president Vaclav Havel, had not breached bankruptcy rules when she failed to provide information to facilitate a company sell-off. In 1999, Mrs Havlova bought part of Prague's Lucerna Palace from a company that was later forced to declare bankruptcy. The administrator of the company's assets asked Mrs Havlova to give him information and documents needed to dissolve and sell-off the company. She failed to do so and was taken to court.

The leaders of the country's governing coalition have approved a package of measures aimed at stabilising the country's troubled health-care system - measures intended to have an effect over the next two years. After the cabinet meeting Tuesday, Miroslav Kalousek, the head of the junior coalition party the Christian Democrats, told journalists that roughly twenty reform measures had been agreed upon, including a 100 percent redistribution of insurance payments among insurance companies. Mr Kalousek stressed that some of the measures had already been put into effect, including the funding of 3.4 billion crowns to troubled hospitals, and the buying up 3 billion crowns in health insurers' debts by consolidation agencies. The new package of measures agreed upon by the cabinet will now be submitted to Health Minister Marie Souckova, to be incorporated into an overall proposal for extensive health-care reforms. Mrs Souckova has staked her ministerial post on the planned reforms that have yet to be debated in Parliament.