Prague, March 8 (CTK) – Tomas Haisman, who headed the asylum and migration section of the Interior Ministry until mid-2017 and was to be the head of the Czech diplomatic mission in Kosovo, died after a serious illness at the age of 66 on Tuesday, daily Lidove noviny (LN) reported on Thursday.
Former interior minister Milan Chovanec (Social Democrats, CSSD) confirmed the news for the Aktualne.cz server, which calls Haisman “the architect of the Czech migration policy.”
Haisman joined the Interior Ministry in late 1992 as an expert in minorities and he soon started focusing on the agenda related to foreigners.
In the 1990s, he created the principles of the Czech position on refugees. He then dealt with a wave of refugees from the Balkans where people left their homes to escape the war waged in the former Yugoslavia.
Haisman headed the ministry’s asylum and migration section for 20 years and he decided on asylum seekers in the Czech Republic.
In the last few years, he made sharp statements about the migrant wave heading towards Europe. In October 2016, he said in Czech parliament that only economic migrants come to Europe from Islamic countries. He openly criticised the EU mandatory quotas for the redistribution of asylum seekers among EU member states, labelling them “neo-Marxist experiments.”
Haisman was to start working as a diplomat in Kosovo this year, but he did not leave for Pristina because of his illness.
