Related articles

The Czech Republic will provide a loan worth 1.3 billion euros (around 27 billion crowns) to the International Monetary Fund for possible help to countries hit by the financial crisis, the internet daily E15 reported on Friday, citing Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek. The loan is the Czech contribution to a trillion dollar aid package which the G20 countries agreed on at their London summit earlier this month. The Czech contribution should be drawn from foreign exchange reserves of the Czech National Bank.

The deal on a caretaker government has led to a serious rift within the Christian Democrats of the outgoing coalition. The party leadership ruled on Wednesday that it would not support the emerging Fischer cabinet, a decision that caused a public rift. At least five deputies, including Finance Minister Miroslav Kalousek on Wednesday pledged to support the caretaker administration, despite a threat from the party leader that if they broke with the party line they would not be allowed to run for the party in the European and parliamentary elections.

The Czech Republic will not accept any former inmates from the Guantanamo Bay military prison camp, Interior Minister Ivan Langer said on Monday in response to a US appeal for EU member states to do so. Mr Langer said that the Czech Republic was not currently equipped to take in any of the camp’s former detainees but that, as the current head of the European Union, it would try to negotiate a common European solution to the problem. Earlier today, I spoke to Markéta Matlochová from the Czech Interior Ministry, who said that the matter was under

All eyes were on Prague on Sunday morning with US President Barack Obama giving a keynote speech just outside Prague Castle – his only public address on his first European tour since becoming president.

EU leaders met with US President Barack Obama at an informal summit of the European Union and the United States in Prague on Sunday. The meeting, organized by the Czech EU presidency on the second day of President Obama’s visit to the Czech capital, followed up on issues discussed earlier this week at the G20 in London and the NATO summit in Strasbourg.

For the past two years, Karel Barták has been the chief of the European Commission’s youth and culture communications unit, making him one of the highest-ranking Czechs in Brussels. Prior to that, he spent over a decade as the Czech News Agency’s European Union correspondent. So how was the transition from reporting on the EU to becoming an official himself? Karel Barták told me over a café a la russe on Brussels’ Place Madou:

The government approved moves to cut Value Added Tax on some labour intensive services at its Monday meeting. The measure should shift a series of services, such as dining in restaurants, getting a hair cut and bike repairs, into the lower nine percent sales tax bracket from the current 19 percent. The broad plans have already been backed at EU level. The step, aimed at saving jobs during the current crisis, is estimated to cost the Czech budget between 3.0 billion and 6.0 billion crowns a year.

This Tuesday marks the halfway point of the Czech Republic’s EU presidency. On a recent visit to Brussels, I met one of the people instrumental in organizing the Czechs’ time at the helm, Milena Vicenová, the Czech Ambassador to the European Union. In the calm of her Brussels office, just a few days before Prague made headlines for the fall of the centre-right government coalition, Ms Vicenová discussed how the presidency had been going so far. For her personally, it has meant a great deal of hard work:

The Czech EU presidency hosted an informal meeting of the bloc’s 27 foreign ministers over the weekend in Hluboká, south Bohemia. Although Czech officials went into the meeting with an ambitious agenda it was the Czech Republic’s own domestic crisis that inevitably drew the most attention. Just days after the fall of the country’s centre-right government EU foreign ministers sought reassurances regarding the Czech EU presidency and the fate of the Lisbon treaty.

Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, meeting with EU counterparts at Hluboka nad Vltavou in the Czech Republic on Friday, expressed support for the Czech EU presidency, despite the fall of Mirek Topolánek’s government this week. He told reporters that it needed full backing until the end of its term in June, stressing that a weak presidency would be disastrous. Mr Frattini made clear the Czech EU presidency needed to lead in a number of areas, including the holding of the upcoming EU-US summit, which will see US President Barack Obama in Prague.