News

Attending a NATO Parliament conference in Prague, NATO Secretary General George Robertson said that the EU's emerging defense force and NATO will be "two sides of the same coin" with "no inconsistency". One example, he said was a Czech bio-chemical warfare detection battalion which had been requested last week by NATO and the United States and which would also be able to accept EU defense assignments. Many units would be complementary since the EU and NATO would not necessarily need them at the same time, Mr. Robertson said, addressing the question of how EU states could finance two defense structures.

A senior member of the opposition Civic Democrats, Petr Necas, has said that Slovak Romanies are not welcome in the Czech Republic. Mr Necas, speaking on a TV discussion programme, said Slovakia was a democratic country and there was no reason for Slovak Roma to seek asylum in the Czech Republic. Around 500 Slovak families - mostly believed to be Romanies - have applied for asylum in the Czech Republic this year, citing poor living conditions and discrimination back home.

The Czech prime minister, Vladimir Spidla, and his Slovak counterpart, Mikulas Dzurinda, have agreed to co-ordinate efforts to deal with the increasing number of Slovak Romanies applying for asylum in the Czech Republic. Speaking after talks in Prague on Friday, the two leaders said ministries in both countries would set up joint working groups to deal with the issue. Slovaks currently make up the largest group of asylum seekers in the Czech Republic.

The Czech and Slovak prime ministers also said co-operation between the Visegrad Four, which also includes Poland and Hungary, would continue once all four join the European Union. Mr Dzurinda visited Prague less than a week after Slovaks voted to join the union; the Czech Republic is to hold a referendum on the matter in the middle of June.

Trade and Industry Minister Milan Urban said on Thursday that the Czech Republic might expand its Temelin nuclear power plant even though its has yet to bring the station's first two reactors fully online after years of breakdowns and problems. The owner of Temelin and the country's main power producer, the state-controlled company CEZ, is to make a decision on new power sources next year. On Thursday the daily Mlada Fronta Dnes quoted Trade and Industry Minister Milan Urban as saying the expansion of nuclear power is one option to replace at least 60 percent of the four-gigawatt capacity at obsolete coal-burning power plants over the next fifteen years. The south Bohemian nuclear plant has raised many protests in neighbouring Austria because of its combination of Soviet design and Western control systems. The Czechs government says the plant is safe.