Prague, Sept 11 (CTK) – Information leaks from criminal files, their expedient interpretation and subsequent influencing of public opinion may fatally threaten constitutionality, says the final report of the Czech MPs’ commission investigating such leaks that the lower house released on Monday.
The Chamber of Deputies plenary session is to debate the report on Tuesday as one of the last points on the agenda of the last regular session in this election tenure.
The commission was established mainly due to the leaks of the recordings of conversations between government ANO chairman and former finance minister Andrej Babis and Marek Pribil, former journalist from the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) that Babis had owned.
However, the report does not deal with this case in particular as its text is rather general.
The commission concludes that information leaks are a dangerous phenomenon since various interest groups can use them to change public opinion with the aim to influence a political competition and thereby destabilise the democratic rule of law.
The report describes public interest and legal responsibility for information leaks in some other European countries.
It also concludes that it is not possible to reliably investigate illegal information flows between the parties to criminal proceedings and the media at present as there is no legal regulation of the protection of personality rights and personal data in handling the information from criminal proceedings in relation to the media.
The commission has proposed that a special body be established within the Supreme State Attorney’s Office to investigate crimes committed by state attorneys. It would also like the law enforcement bodies to be obliged to register and archive their contacts with the media.
The commission has recommended that the laws on personal data protection and on free access to information be amended.
It has also proposed to define public interest that would justify the obtaining and publishing information from criminal proceedings and to explicitly ban private detectives from gaining data from sources within the law enforcement bodies.
The proposals are in the form of resolutions on which the Chamber of Deputies is yet to vote.
The police were checking the recordings of the Babis-Pribil meetings that appeared on an anonymous Twitter account in early May.
In the recordings, Babis and Pribil discuss prepared articles about Babis’s political rivals and the most suitable time for releasing such compromising material. Further recordings in which they debated the police investigation into some cases emerged later.
However, Babis and Pribil denied having ever had police files on open cases in their hands.
Babis, who was dismissed from the coalition cabinet in May due to his dubious business activities, says the recordings are manipulated and are part of a campaign against him.
