Prague, May 3 (CTK) – Several dozen people demonstrated in support of Russian student and anarchist Igor Shevtsov, who was expelled from the Czech Republic last week, and criticised the court verdict in his case as unrightful outside the Interior Ministry in Prague on Tuesday.
Shevtsov, who also attended the meeting, spoke about the persecution of anarchists in Russia.
The court expelled Shevtsov from the Czech Republic for two years for having recorded a man spraying anarchist inscriptions on a wall of the Prague-Ruzyne prison complex. He was found guilty of assisting in causing harm to property of another.
Shevtsov was also suspected of having thrown a Molotov cocktail on the house of Defence Minister Martin Stropnicky last June, but the court acquitted him of the charges.
Tuesday’s protest meeting was attended by activists and former dissidents John Bok and Petr Uhl, signatories of the Charter 77 anti-communist manifesto.
“We suppose that the court has connected both cases expediently. Being an anarchist should not be qualified as a crime. The verdict on expulsion is disproportionate,” one of the protest’s organisers said.
Uhl and Bok are of the view that both the police and the state attorney’s office made a mistake in the Shevtsov case.
“It is absurd that he was convicted of recording a spraying man,” Uhl said.
Bok criticised Interior Minister Milan Chovanec in this case. “Chovanec is a typical example of a totalitarian interior minister,” said Bok.
Marek Jakoubek, head of the Institute of Ethnology at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, where Shevtsov studies, also stood up for him.
Jakoubek said Shevtsov was a hard-working student. If other students like him came from Russia, the faculty would rank among the best in the world, he added.
