Prague, Jan 26 (CTK) – Czech far-right politician Adam B. Bartos received a two-year suspended prison sentence with three years of probation for Holocaust denial, incitement to hatred and defamation of the nation in his texts and speeches, a Prague district court ruled on Friday.
Bartos appealed against the verdict on the spot. State attorney Zdenka Galkova is considering whether to appeal or not.
Bartos, leader of the far-right extra-parliamentary party National Democracy, defended himself based on the freedom of speech. “Some people may not like what I say, but this does not mean I do not have the freedom of speech like anybody else,” he told journalists after the verdict was issued.
Bartos said the statements he had made and which the court challenged became common opinions even among presidential candidates in the meantime.
The people who came to support Bartos in the courtroom on Friday included failed presidential candidate Petr Hannig, a music producer and marginal politician who received 0.56 percent of the vote in the first round of the election two weeks ago.
Bartos claimed that the aim of the trial was to intimidate him and force him to withdraw from political life.
Judge Pavla Hajkova concluded that the prosecution was right to declare that Bartos issued anti-Semitic books and his speeches, articles and Internet comments presented Jews as human beings who only had negative qualities.
The court said Bartos presented misleading statements without any evidence in order to reinforce prejudices about the detrimental influence of Jews, immigrants and Muslims.
In his speech in the courtroom, Bartos compared himself to Czech democratic politician Milada Horakova who was sentenced to death in a Communist show trial in 1950.
The state should not lead political trials with its citizens because this undermines its legitimacy, Bartos said.
Galkova said Bartos did not challenge the fact that he had made hateful statements, but he only claimed he had the right to say anything he wanted. The freedom of speech is not unlimited, however, she said.
Galkova dismissed Bartos’s claim that he had the right to say the things he said since he was an investigative journalist and a head of a political party. Bartos’s texts are not polemics with historical facts because they present monothematic opinions, she said.
An expert in extremism concluded that the books that Bartos wrote or issued were clearly anti-Semitic and some of them even denied the Holocaust.
In a separate case, Bartos received a suspended sentence for an anti-Semitic text he placed at the grave of Anezka Hruzova, murdered in Polna in 1899.
The rumour that the young woman was a victim of ritual murder spread after the crime and a local Jew, Leopold Hilsner, was found guilty of it without any convincing evidence. He was pardoned only in 1918. Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, later first Czechoslovak president, was one of those who fought the prejudice in the Hilsner affair.
