Supreme Court overturns verdict against official who posthumously granted countess Czech citizenship

The Supreme Court has overturned a ruling against an official who granted Czechoslovak citizenship to Josefina Czerninová, a countess who left Czechoslovakia in 1945, opening the way for her descendants to successfully claim restitution of her former land and property. The Supreme Court ruled that the conclusion that the official had behaved negligently was in extreme contradiction with the factual findings of the case, and also objected to the criminal prosecution of officials simply for arriving at a legal opinion contrary to the one the prosecutors would have liked.

Czerninová, who came from the Schwarzenberg family, left Czechoslovakia in 1945, and was subsequently deprived of her property by the Beneš Decrees. In 1999, the authorities posthumously issued Czerninová a Czechoslovak citizenship certificate, ruling that she had been a citizen of Czechoslovakia at the time of her death in 1965. As a result, her descendants were able to reclaim millions of square metres of forest and other real estate in southern and western Bohemia, including a castle in the Karlovy Vary region.

In 2013, Ivana Odarčenková, one of the officials who made the decision to issue Czerninová a citizenship certificate, was handed a one-day prison sentence, suspended for one year, for negligence and mishandling of the task of a public official. In her appeal, Ms. Odarčenková stated that the goal of the criminal proceedings had clearly been to annul the decision taken on Czerninová's citizenship in order to re-assert the state's property interests.