Brno, Dec 5 (CTK) – A Prague district court will again deal with the case of communist prosecutor Tomas Liptak, who assisted in the banishment of farmers from their homes in 1953, since the Supreme Court (NS) has accepted the supreme state attorney’s objection to halting his prosecution, NS says in its database.
The NS made this decision a month ago, but it has not released its justification yet.
Besides, the NS recently ordered a district court to reopen the case of former Communist police chief Rudolf Pavlicek in Turnov, north Bohemia, which Supreme State Attorney Pavel Zeman also initiated.
He also disagreed with halting the prosecution of former municipal official Rudolf Pavlicek for his persecution of farmers in the 1950s. However, the NS has not decided on Zeman’s petition for an appellate review in this case yet.
As far as Liptak is concerned, Zeman argues that the amnesty from 1960 does not apply to him since he committed a wilful crime against private property. As a prosecutor, Liptak was a member of the commission that decided on the illegal relocation.
Though the commission did not directly decide on the families’ property, it selected which families would have to move from their place of residence. The farmers’ families then had to leave a major part of their property there, which was an infringement of personal property, Zeman says.
All members of the relocation commission were certainly aware of that the forced relocation was based on ideological grounds of the “class struggle” and at the same time, it was apparent that the relocated people were only guilty of being related to the convicted “kulaks” [affluent farmers], Zeman writes in his petition.
The Office for the Documentation and Investigation of Communist Crimes (UDV) says Liptak contributed to illegal forced relocation of several farming families in central Bohemia.
Liptak did not protest against the decision and thereby breached the law on the prosecutor’s office as he caused damage to other people because of their political conviction, the UDV said earlier.
Criminal charges against Liptak were levelled only in May 2015, 62 years after the suspected crime was committed, because the crimes of communism do not fall under the statute of limitations.
The communist regime was relocating private farmers along with their families from 1951 to 1954 in order to weaken traditional village communities. The number of the relocated families is estimated at 3,000-4,000. They had to move to selected farms in areas remote from their homes and their property was confiscated by the state.
