Brno, July 14 (CTK) – Courts will deal again with the incident in which two Chinese took a Tibetan flag from a protester and threw it into the river during a visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Prague in 2016 as the Supreme Court (NS) returned the case for reappraisal, the Seznam Zpravy server has reported.
The NS annulled the valid verdicts by the Prague district and municipal courts.
Supreme State Attorney Pavel Zeman filed a petition for an appellate review with the NS.
The server writes that a sentence by NS judge Vladimir Vesely, saying that the crime of robbery may have been committed in this case was crucial for the ruling.
“According to the stated circumstances, the defendants namely used violence against the damaged woman with the intention to take possession of a thing of another – the Tibetan flag that she was pressing to her body,” Vesely said.
Xi’s three-day visit to Prague in March 2016 was accompanied by demonstrations against the Chinese policy in the sphere of human rights. Some of them resulted in skirmishes between supporters and opponents of the Chinese regime.
In one of them, a Chinese couple attempted to take a Tibetan flag away from a female protester who was resisting them. They eventually managed to grasp it and threw it into the Vltava (Moldau) River.
The lower level courts concluded that the man and woman from China had committed no crime because the flag was of a small value. The courts sent the case to the municipal authorities to check whether a minor offence had been committed.
Zeman argues that the property motivation is not necessary in the crime of bribery and this is why the flag’s value is not crucial in this case.
The Chinese used violence against the female protester in order to take the flag away from her. Moreover, the action was politically motivated and they violated the protester’s right to express her opinions on the Tibetan issue, Zeman wrote in his petition for an appellate review.
The case will return to the Prague 7 District Court.
