Current Affairs | All stories

Parliamentary hearings to assess the suitability of candidates for the new European Commission are underway in Brussels with the spotlight now on Štefan Füle, the Czech commissioner-designate for enlargement and neighbourhood policy. Mr. Füle, an experienced career diplomat, is generally seen as highly suitable for the post, but some members of the European Parliament have questioned his communist past.

At 3 o’clock in the morning on Monday Israeli immigration police and soldiers stormed the apartment of a Czech NGO worker in the West Bank city of Ramallah and arrested her. According to the Israeli authorities, her crime was having overstayed her tourist visa and she was promptly deported. The Palestinian organisation for which she was working however maintains that she was arrested unlawfully in the most recent of a string of raids on activists in the Israeli-occupied territories.

The Czech Republic last year slipped down the rankings of more or less corruption free countries. Politicians’ failure to tackle what it almost universally recognised as a major problem was one of the reasons for that fall. The caretaker government has now adopted a bold anti-corruption package which it hopes will be given a fast track through parliament.

Four days of heavy snow have disrupted life in the Czech Republic. The country’s international airports and Czech Railways reported long delays and people who set out by car faced snow-drifts and icy roads. The first day of the working week further complicated the situation as thousands of Czechs struggled to get to work. City traffic moved at snails pace and walking proved a major challenge since few pavements had been cleared of snow.

On the agenda of the Supreme Administrative Court on Monday is a much-discussed case that has been long in the making: a governmental proposal to dissolve the far-right Workers’ Party. Different governments have asserted that the party is a political wing of the neo-Nazi movement, however a previous attempt to ban the party outright in early 2009 was dismissed for lack of evidence. This time around the Ministry of the Interior is sparing no punches.

On Thursday, the High Court in Prague awarded compensation to two women, one of them a Romany sterilized without her knowledge in 2003, the other a non-Romany whose fallopian tubes were removed without her consent in 2006. The ruling confirmed a previous verdict – the first of its kind – and raised the amount originally awarded. Gwendolyn Albert, a human rights activist and expert on the issue, discusses the verdict.

The completion of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Dubai, made scores of international headlines this week. Among those who took part in the huge project in the United Arab Emirates was a Czech firm called Pega Hoist, whose high-speed construction elevators were used throughout the building stage. One, even remains permanently, some 600 metres off the ground.

Under guidelines introduced on January 1, the Czech Republic has some of the most liberal legislation in Europe when it comes to drug use. Whereas previously having “an amount no bigger than a small amount” was permitted, now drug users will not be charged with a crime for having, for instance, 15 grammes of marijuana, or 1.5 grammes of heroin. But what will be the impact of these guidelines? That's something I discussed with Jiří Richter, director of Sananim, a drug counselling service in Prague.

As of January 1 the law enables Czech judges to mete out an alternative form of punishment to light offenders: house arrest. It was to have been an easy solution to the problem of overcrowded prisons, but a lack of functional electronic bracelets has given the Justice Ministry a new headache.

The Czech shooter Kateřina Emmons made headlines around the world in August 2008 when she won the first gold medal at the last Olympics in Beijing. Since then she and her husband Matt – also one of the world’s leading shooters – have had their first child, a girl named Julie. Right now Kateřina Emmons is home in the Czech Republic, ahead of the start of the season. When we spoke, I asked her how she had found returning to competition since having a baby.