The President of the Constitutional Court stated that the spring closure of the Czech borders was a “clear unconstitutional step” by the Czech government. Pavel Rychetský thus again puts the letter of the law above its content.
Spring border closure according to the President of the Constitutional Court, Pavel Rychetský, it was absolutely unconstitutional for the departure from the Czech Republic, which was accepted by the government at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. He said this on Sunday in an interview for Czech Television. He also criticized Prime Minister Andrej Babiš for his past. The Prime Minister objected …….
“At one point (the government) closed the borders and no one was allowed to leave the Czech Republic. So it is absolutely unconstitutional. The government can close the borders in that crisis situation, but to return or to come to the country. But we have in the constitution, for reasons that only older people remember, the totalitarian regime, we have an explicit provision that no one can be prevented from leaving this country, “said Rychetský when asked if he had in the current coronavirus crisis sometimes the feeling that the government has gone astray and the Constitutional Court should intervene.
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Question number one: Mr. President of the Constitutional Court – so why didn’t you intervene ?! Rychetsky pretends to be the fairest and has done nothing? This is precisely the politicking of a matter as serious as the current coronavirus pandemic. Of course, this is an absolutely extraordinary step in an absolutely extraordinary situation. If we evaluate the government’s measures from the position of the Constitution and ignore what was happening in the world at the time, in mid-March this year, we can look exactly as Rychetský says. The government acted “clearly unconstitutionally” and “got out of the way.”
However, if we put the spring intervention of the government into our rights to travel freely across borders into the current situation, if we realize that the ban on crossing borders was announced by virtually the vast majority of EU countries, Rychetský’s criticism takes a completely different form. And what about curfews as harsh as Israel declared not only during the first wave, but especially during the “second wave”? If we look from the same perspective, ie from the perspective of the guardian of the letter of the law over its content, all the governments of the so-called democratic world have certainly acted unconstitutionally. In fact, the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, who did not formally close the borders, would have reacted “best” to this view, but practically no one had practically crossed them.
Question number two: Is it a criticism of the government precisely because it is headed by Andrej Babiš, led by the StB? Rychetský says that this is proof of the “disappearance” of the post-November ethos. He could never have imagined that it would happen after 1989. There is also a rather trivial answer to this question. Babiš’s rise dates back to the intervention of the police at the Office of the Government in 2013. The intervention, which became famous as a “handbag process” with Jana Nečasová, formerly Nagyová. The Czech right suffered a crushing defeat in the elections in the autumn of 2013, because it managed to portray Nečas as a fool (even though he quite deserved it by the way!). Suddenly, the YES movement became the second strongest party, entered the government, and then we know the story quite well.
Yes, I also could not imagine that one day a person without a pure lustration certificate would become the head of the Czech government. However, politics is quite ruthless and the behavior of Nečas, as well as Bohuslav Sobotka and Milan Chovanec, was handled perfectly by the ODS and the CSSD. Again, I can only state that Rychetský’s critic is gliding on the surface. Moreover, if he now joins Miloš Zeman, he also served him devoutly during his reign. So does he have any right to cry over the spilled milk he helped spill?
Taken with the permission of the author from JanBarton.blog.idnes.cz
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