London/Prague, Feb 22 (CTK) – Czech senior government officials as well as President Milos Zeman made xenophobic statements about refugees and migrants last year, the Amnesty International (AI) organisation claims in its latest report on the state of human rights in the world released on Thursday.
Along with the Czech Republic’s refusal to accept the refugee quotas, AI criticises the unequal access of the Roma children to education, the lengthy procedure in the case of the removal of a pig farm at the site of a Nazi internment camp for the Roma in Lety, south Bohemia, as well as the Czech arms exports to the countries where they may be used for acts violating human rights.
In the report mapping the state of human rights in 159 countries, the organisation does not release the names of particular Czech representatives who were speaking about refugees in a xenophobic manner.
In a paragraph headlined ” Racism and xenophobia” it writes that “during the pre-election campaign, the minister of interior presented as a success the restrictive policies that lead refugees to avoid the Czech Republic.”
AI also reminds of the December lawsuit filed by the European Commission (EC) with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) against the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary over the violation of the EU quotas for the relocation of asylum seekers.
“The Czech Republic accepted only 12 asylum-seekers out of the 2,691 it had been assigned under the 2015 EU Emergency Relocation Scheme – which aimed to relocate refugees from EU member states such as Greece and Italy – by the end of the year,” AI points out.
According to AI, discrimination against Roma children in their access to education continues in the Czech Republic. The organisation refers to the annual report of the Czech government council for human rights for 2016, which shows that Roma children still face discrimination in education and “over 24 percent of Roma pupils continued to be educated in ethnically segregated schools.”
AI also publishes the case of a primary school in Ostrava, north Moravia, in which a court ruled in March that the school had discriminated against two Roma pre-school children by refusing to register them for the first grade in 2014, claiming that it had reached full capacity.
In the “Discrimination – Roma” subhead, AI included an amendment to the law on welfare benefits under which municipalities can restrict the access to housing allowances by declaring zones of “socially pathological behaviour” where residents would be barred from claiming the benefits.
“NGOs raised concerns that the new regulation would disproportionately affect Roma and poor people,” AI writes.
In the “Racism and xenophobia” AI highlights the case of the Lety pig farm, built in the 1970s at the site of a former WW2 internment camp for the Roma. The AI refers to the European Commissioner for Human Rights who was concerned about the length of the process of its purchase. The Czech government signed a contract on the purchase of the farm with its owner last year only.
AI also expresses surprise at the fact that the Czech Republic continued to export arms to the countries “where there was a substantial risk that such arms could be used to commit or facilitate serious human rights violations, including the unlawful use of force against protesters or opposition groups.”
The report also recalls that during an arms fair in Brno last May, Zeman stated that the Czech arms industry needed to “export globally,” denying that the country had responsibility to prevent the re-export of its equipment to countries which are “not safe.”
