English articles
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The Sekyra Foundation held an international conference on the power of parties, money and influence at the KVH (19.6.2023). Danuše Nerudová, who has already launched her campaign to be elected as an MEP, served as the "opening speaker". After the debate, she quickly left. You can listen to the audio recording and make up your own mind. Only "two or three questions" were allowed, I spoke from the front row, I did not get a chance to speak. I would argue the same point on Ms. Neruda's views as below. The event started 75 min late with no one apologizing. The public also had to wait while the organizers said goodbye to Ms. Neruda backstage. Of the scheduled 6 hours, the conference lasted, I estimate, about 3 hours.
This was followed by the Sekyra Foundation event - an introduction (in English) and a subsequent debate by the participants (three from the public and three from the organizers). The public participants did not respect the moderator's instructions for a structured debate. As soon as they were given the microphone, instead of the required short introduction, they started straight into a lengthy lecture. My warning was silenced, but the "lectures" had already been cut short by the participants themselves. By the end, basically only the organizers were debating, the others had left, the hall was empty. My short contribution (from 1:05:35) was evaluated by the words of the organizer: "Well, I hope you will leave already". I was thus unable to finish my disrupted contribution on the need to change the electoral system, including a demonstration of the functionality of democracy in Switzerland.
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Update 23.6.2023: New EU law was supposed to protect journalists, instead it legalises spying on them - "The law should protect journalists and their sources. The commission's proposal was not perfect, but it has been further degraded after recent negotiations. This is extremely worrying." - But if the current version of the proposal is ratified, the Freedom of the Media Act will "legalise the use of spyware against journalists" - "The Council is taking dangerous steps to legalise unacceptable forms of surveillance of journalists and their sources." - EU Document Pegassus (22.5.2023)
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Daniel Ellsberg, described by CNN as the "patron saint of whistleblowers", died last Friday at the age of 92.
"All governments lie and therefore nothing they say can be trusted. Every piece of information they give must always be verified and confronted. Checking power is the most important part of democracy."
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In June 1971, Daniel Ellsberg placed truth above lies masquerading as the national interest, throwing away a stellar career as one of the Pentagon's most respected analysts and planners. He gave New York Times reporters eight thousand pages of top-secret documents about the Vietnam War that refuted everything four American presidents had told Congress and their citizens about it. It earned him a number of felony charges and a proposed sentence of 155 years in prison.
His actions are being hailed as the beginning of the road to ending the Vietnam War. One man forced a desperate administration of President Richard Nixon to attack freedom of the press in court. The ensuing litigation produced perhaps the most important ruling in the history of the United States Supreme Court.
Citing the U.S. Constitution, it said, "The press is to serve the citizens, not the rulers. The power of the government to censor the press has been abolished so that the press may forever be free to control the government. The press was protected so that it could reveal the secrets of government and inform the citizens. Only a free and unfettered press can effectively expose fraud in government."
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Hello, sir,
I'd like to make an appointment. We've been litigating for 14 years over 40cm². No, it's not a mistake. Now we have to remove the building. It's a piece of land that's on our property, where the neighbour has no access. It was all the fault of the building authority. The neighbour first agreed, it was built - and changed the decision. It was the fault of the building authority, who sent us a demolition letter yesterday. This investment would be 550,000 kc, against his 500 kc. Our neighbour also destroyed a 500,000 kc fence on our property. And again, 2 experts with 2 different opinions. The judge said, "What's my point?" "Justice". He said, "There is no justice, and don't look for it in court." I'm already in bad health. Now I've been diagnosed with cancer. Two months of radiation, what happens next is in the stars. I'm so desperate I don't want to live. I'm begging for an appointment. Too much!!! I'll tell you who it is and why the court always sends us crazy. We have exhausted all remedies, but we have not been able to achieve a positive result. Now we have one last option - the European Court of Human Rights.
Married couple Helena and Zdeněk Petrů, 2.6.2023
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Prime Minister Petr Fiala: He has no choice but to give the contract to the crooks, is it according to the law?! Really "plaster prime minister". How many more blows will the "plaster" of the Prime Minister and the government take and endure - and how many more will the citizens take, bear and endure from these crooks who are destroying their lives and their future? The content of Lubomír Zaorálek's ten-minute speech at the SOCDEM congress is a shocking testimony to the times. It is not, of course, the subject of the public media. JŠ
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In the global index of clientelistic capitalism, the Czech Republic has quietly climbed to second place just behind the most corrupt dictatorship in the world - that of Putin's Russia. There is no worse comparison. And at home, do we still want to pretend that everything is fine and that democracy is only flourishing? Everyone seems to have got used to it, and perhaps even considers it "normal".
Former President Miloš Zeman, with the help of Justice Minister Maria Benešová, demonstrably organised the judicial persecution of his opponents. Zeman's predecessor, Václav Klaus, made it impossible to investigate dozens of corruption scandals involving his loyalists from the 1990s by announcing the most controversial amnesty in Czech history. The alleged "treasurer" of the whole operation and Klaus's friend Peter Kovarcik died when the police started to notice more than six hundred million crowns that appeared in his Swiss bank account at the time of the amnesty, when he allegedly slipped in the bathroom... Even that was not worth noticing for Czech politics. The latest example of the Czech imitation of the rule of law is the continuation of the scandalous saga of the double justice minister Pavel Blažek.
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"The freedom to be inoffensive is no freedom. The law should not aid and abet this new intolerance. Freedom of expression can only suffer if the law prevents us from dealing with its consequences. I offer my wholehearted support to the campaign to reform Section 5. Thank you very much." Rowan Atkinson
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My starting point when it comes to considering any issue relating to freedom of expression is my passionate belief that the second most valuable thing in the world is the right to express oneself freely. I think the most valuable thing in life is food in your mouth and the third most valuable thing is a roof over your head. But a firm second place for me is freedom of expression, just below the need to sustain life itself. This is due to the fact that throughout my professional life I have enjoyed freedom of speech in this country and fully expect that to continue to be the case.
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