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The government’s human rights commissioner Monika Šimůnková resigned on Thursday, claiming the cabinet had marginalised the position to the point where it was becoming meaningless. Ms Šimůnková has had her critics, even among those whose rights she was appointed to defend. But many have placed the blame squarely at the foot of successive governments which have slowly sought to undermine the post. The Ostrava social worker Kumar Vishwanathan, who works with the local Roma community, sat on the commission from its inception in 1998 and was in close

The Canadian Embassy has confirmed media reports that the government in Ottawa is on the verge of lifting visas for Czechs. Visas for Czechs wishing to visit Canada were reintroduced in 2009 following a rise in the number of Roma people seeking asylum. The Czech government had appealed to the European Union to put pressure on Canada to abolish the visa requirement.

While many European leaders are concerned about healthcare costs related to smoking, the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, opposes curbs on the habit. Indeed, on a visit to the country’s biggest cigarette factory on Wednesday, he made an unlikely recommendation with regard to starting to smoke. But an anti-smoking campaigner says his views have no place in the modern world.

The person most likely to become the Czech Republic’s next finance minister has set off a debate about the country’s foreign policy priorities. Speaking at an economic forum, Jan Mládek of the Social Democrats said criticism of Russia and China could cost thousands of Czech jobs. Critics say human rights have to come before exports.

Restoration work at the famous Palác Lucerna in Prague has taken an unusual turn – combining modern street art with the ancient technique of window decoration. The feature that has attracted attention is a stained glass window that was designed by one of the best known local graffiti artists, Pasta Oner.

The recent presentation of a US award for opponents of Communism to Václav Klaus has sparked a war of words in the Czech Republic. Some believe the former prime minister and president did nothing whatever to fight totalitarianism – and should be stripped of the prize. Now Mr. Klaus has responded with a detailed defence.

Cameron Kerry, the younger brother of the current US Secretary of State John Kerry, visited the Czech Republic with his wife this week. On Monday he went to the small town of Horní Benešov in northern Moravia to look for traces of family history.

The European Commission recently warned of rising poverty in some EU member states. While statistics suggest that the Czech Republic has one of the lowest poverty rates in Europe, experts say it may have a big problem in the making. Close to a million of the country’s over ten million inhabitants are now living just above the poverty line and 400,000 are living in extreme poverty. In the first nine months of this year the state has already paid out 40 percent more in social support than it did in 2012. I spoke to Michael Stannett, the head of the

A court in Switzerland has handed down prison sentences to five Czech businessmen after finding them guilty of fraud and money-laundering. The five were sentenced after a long criminal case investigating the illegal takeover of the Czech coal company Mostecká uhelná společnost, or MUS. The verdict is being seen as a damning indictment of both the ‘wild privatisation’ of the 1990s and also the Czech criminal justice system, which failed to prosecute the case successfully.

The Czech Republic –or Czechia – a dilemma that Czechs have been unable to resolve since the 1993 Czech-Slovak divorce left the country without a one-word name that would roll of the tongue easily and that the public could identify with. On a state visit to Israel this week, President Miloš Zeman revived a twenty-year-old debate on an informal English name for his country, publicly thanking his host, President Simon Perez, for using the informal name Czechia rather than the official Czech Republic. I discussed the proposal with the head of the Czech