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The Czech Foreign Ministry has denounced Belarus’s presidential election as “a sham orchestrated by a regime of repression and fear”. In a statement on social media, it called for the immediate release of all political prisoners. The ministry highlighted systemic human rights abuses, suppression of opposition, and censorship, stating the election did not meet democratic standards and cannot be considered legitimate. Czechia reaffirmed its support for Belarusian democratic forces, civil society, and independent media striving for a free Belarus with a European perspective.
President Petr Pavel also described Lukashenko's reelection as "a farce, designed to silence dissent". He said the Czech Republic stands behind Belarusians fighting for democracy and freedom.
Alexander Lukashenko was reported to have won 87.6% of the vote in Sunday’s election , securing his seventh five-year term in office.
Several dozen people gathered in front of the Belarusian embassy in Prague's Troja district on Sunday to protest against the repressive rule of President Alexander Lukashenko. The demonstration was organised by the Belarusian Student Union in the Czech Republic. "We want to show that Belarus belongs to Europe, that we are not afraid of Lukashenko and will continue to fight," the organizer of the protest Aliaksandr Parshankou told Czech Radio. Belarusians in exile are unable to vote because the Belarusian government banned voting from abroad after the 2020 protests.
Support for the Czech proposal to restrict the movement of Russian diplomats in the Schengen area is growing and has now received backing from Poland, which currently holds the EU Council presidency, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky told journalists in Brussels on Monday. Czechia is pushing for the proposal to be included in the forthcoming 16th package of anti-Russian sanctions currently being debated.
Czechia has secured backing from over ten EU member states, with more expected to join. The upcoming sanctions package will also target firms aiding Russia’s military and measures against Moscow’s shadow fleet used to circumvent sanctions.
Czechs living in Afghanistan, Yemen, North Korea, Libya, Palestine, Haiti, Somalia, and Western Sahara will likely be unable to vote by mail in this year’s parliamentary elections due to unreliable postal services. These regions are excluded from the government regulation enabling mail-in voting, introduced by a law passed last year. In these areas, Czechs can still vote in person at designated embassies in nearby countries. For example, voters in Afghanistan must travel to Islamabad, Pakistan, while those in Somalia will vote in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs will monitor postal service reliability for future adjustments.
The Ministry of Justice has come under fire for failing to prepare a law that would make it easier to crack down on money laundering and confiscate illegally acquired assets. Lukáš Kraus, a lawyer and coordinator of the Resilient Czech Republic initiative, pointed out that according to the National Centre against Organised Crime, an estimated 100 billion crowns was laundered in this country in 2020 and 2021 alone. A tighter legislation which aims to crack-down on this practice by freezing or confiscating assets on the basis of “significant indications” that the assets were illegally acquired was to have been ready by the end of last year, but the Justice Ministry has admitted it will not be ready before the October general elections. Today, the authorities often freeze suspicious accounts, but because they lack proof of money laundering, they have to reverse the decision. Under the new bill, it would be up to the owner of the account to prove that the money was acquired legally.
Research on the Holocaust is experiencing turbulent development, with historians still the most active on the topic, but sociologists, anthropologists and scholars from the social sciences and humanities also increasingly making contributions, Michala Jandák Lončíková from Masaryk Institute told the ctk news agency on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz extermination camp.
One of the Institute’s many projects is the MemoMap which allows users to map the fate of Prague’s Jewish community in the Second World War. Thanks to the app, users can trace the stories of individual Jewish inhabitants -where they lived in Prague, where they were arrested and places from which they were banned on Nazi orders.
The authors of the project plan to map other places in the Czech Republic as well, so as to throw more light on the fate of Jews in Czechia and bring their stories to the attention of the younger generation.
The MemoMap app was created by the Masaryk Institute and the Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences. The application displays the data of more than 30,000 Holocaust victims.
A group of MPs, from both the government and opposition parties, want to tighten the conditions for obtaining a taxi driver's license in Czechia. According to the proposal, only holders of a driving license issued in the Czech Republic or another EU member state would be able to obtain it. The main aim of their proposal is to improve road safety. They argue that more and more foreigners from non-EU countries are applying for jobs as taxi drivers, for whom driving in the country is sometimes a challenge. According to statistics close to half of the 15, 000 taxi driver licenses issued in recent years were issued to drivers from non-EU member states –over six thousand to Ukrainian nationals, over eleven hundred licenses to citizens of Uzbekistan and one hundred licenses to citizens of Nigeria, among others.
Tuesday should be overcast and rainy around the country with day temperatures between 3 and 8, possibly as high as 11 degrees Celsius in Moravia.
Eighty years ago, Allied forces reached and entered the now-infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. The event provided the date for the modern International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which offers Czechia a chance to reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust, and to consider what work still needs to be done.
In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory in his 7th presidential election on Sunday. The 70-year-old autocrat, who has ruled Belarus since 1994, was reported to have won 86.8% of the vote. On Sunday, dozens of people protested outside the Belarusian embassy in Prague's Troja district to show their discontent with the alleged results. I spoke with the Director of the Office of the Democratic Forces of Belarus in the Czech Republic Kryscina Šyjanok to discuss these developments and the role of the Belarusian diaspora in advocating for a democratic transition in Belarus.
Czech tennis player Kateřina Siniaková has secured her third doubles title at the Australian Open, marking the tenth Grand Slam title of her career. Together with her American partner Taylor Townsend, the top-seeded duo lived up to expectations, defeating the Taiwanese-Latvian pairing of Hsieh Su-Wei and Jelena Ostapenko in a gripping final.
One of the toughest dogsledding races in Europe, called Šediváček’s Long, is traditionally held in the small village of Jedlová in the Orlice Mountains.
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