The Supreme Court rejected the statement of the Ministry of Finance, which in at least two publicly known cases stated that the state should not apologize for President Miloš Zeman.
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In short, both cases are that the head of state made a statement that later turned out to be untrue. Both cases were dealt with by the courts, which said that the state must apologize for Zeman.
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One of them, which concerns Czech Television councilor Zdeněk Šarapatka, has now been decided by the Supreme Court. He rejected the ministry’s appeal and confirmed that the state must apologize.
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The point was that Zdeněk Šarapatka worked at the Office of the Government as an adviser when Miloš Zeman was prime minister (1998-2002). After years on TV’s Barrandov Week with the President, Zeman said of a former member of his advisory team that he had fired him for incompetence.
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But according to the courts, this was not true.
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See the final verdict of the Supreme Court in the photo gallery:
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Judge of the Supreme Court František Ištvánek in his decision, which has the List of Reports available, describes that both cases are related.
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The second is a case in which Terezie Kaslová – the granddaughter of journalist Ferdinand Peroutek – is suing the state because Zeman stated about her grandfather that he wrote an article in Přítomnost magazine entitled “Hitler is a gentleman”.
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The case was already being resolved by the Supreme Court in 2018, when it ruled that Kaslová should not sue the Office of the President of the Republic (which she had done before), but the Ministry of Finance.
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In the case of Sharapatka, Ištvánek now reiterated that in the Peroutka case the Supreme Court had already explained that the president was not responsible for his own statements.
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“This does not mean that there is no entity for damages (property or non-property) in private law relations caused by the president in the performance of his function, which would not be responsible for such possible damages,” said Ištvánek. That entity is therefore the Ministry of Finance.
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In the appeal, the director of the substitute agenda of the Ministry of Finance, Monika Vláčilová, for example, claimed that this was a precedent. The courts, as she stated, never declared that an official’s appearance on a private television station was maladministration. “The appearance of the President of the Republic on a private television station is not bound by any procedural or substantive norms,” Vláčilová wrote.
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However, after the decision of the Supreme Court, the ministry wrote that it respects this verdict and will immediately apologize to Sharapatka on behalf of Zeman.
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In this decision, Judge Ištvánek also mentioned that the Prague Municipal Court did not deviate from the earlier conclusions of the Supreme Court, not only in the aforementioned Peroutka case.
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“In other words, the appeal of the defendant (Ministry of Finance) does not offer any discretionary potential, within which the Supreme Court should deal with new or otherwise legal issues arising from its consistent decision to date,” Ištvánek wrote.
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At the same time, the judge was praised by the Prague Municipal Court, stating in his verdict that in this case, President Zeman did not evaluate the work of Sharapatka with his statement, but dishonored him with this statement.
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