Brno, Aug 26 (CTK) – The Constitutional Court (US) rejected Wednesday a complaint by a Romany man who demanded an apology and a 500,000-crown compensation from the Czech state for having been sent to a special primary school for the slightly mentally disabled.
The Romany claimed that he had been placed in a special school only due to his ethnicity, which he called discrimination.
The US ruled that the lower-level courts had sufficiently assessed the case and it shared their conclusion that the complainant had been placed to a special school on the basis of his intellectual powers and not as a consequence of discrimination against ethnicity.
His intellectual capacity was being assessed continuously during the school attendance by psychological tests using several methods and on the basis of his study results and school marks, the US said.
The fact that he was placed in and stayed at a special school was not a result of a single examination and a mere routine approach of the respective authorities, the court added.
The complainant claims that the placing in a special school infringed his personality rights in an unacceptable way. Therefore, he filed a personality protection complaint in 2008.
However, the Prague Municipal Court rejected it a year later, since no discrimination was proved.
In 2010, the Prague High Court confirmed the verdict and the Supreme Court rejected the man’s appellate review.
He turned to the US that rejected his complaint as unsubstantiated.
The district authority in Cheb, west Bohemia, sent the Romany to a special school at the age of seven in 1985 under the communist regime in Czechoslovakia when he was aged seven. He completed his primary school attendance there ten years later.
The complainant lived in a children’s home from the age of two until 1996 when he turned 18 and became adult. Then he completed a regular primary education and later he even passed a secondary school leaving exam.
