Constitutional Court rejects bid to annul law honoring Edvard Beneš

The Czech Constitutional Court has rejected a proposal to overturn the law declaring former president Edvard Beneš “deserving of the state.” Judges dismissed the case without reviewing it, ruling that the Mladá Boleslav–based association Primer, which filed the motion, lacked the legal standing to do so. Adopted in 2004, the symbolic law consists of a single sentence: “Edvard Beneš has merited the state.” Similar laws honor Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Milan Rastislav Štefánik, and Václav Havel. The Beneš law sparked heated debate over his role in the 1938 Munich crisis and the postwar expulsion of Germans.