Czech press survey - February 28

But it cannot be passed over in silence that the opponents of the complaint are connected by the horror of authorities being touched, Mitrofanov writes.

This means authorities that should stay somewhere in the heaven, unreachable, unlimited in their acts, authorities that should go unpunished, authorities that reward their vasals who help them once in a couple of years dazzle the masses with election campaigns while in the rest of time they jointly disdain these masses, Mitrofanov writes.

Petr Honzejk writes in Hospodarske noviny that the attempt to charge Klaus with high treason is an expression of opportunism and an utter lack of any legal awareness.

True, the harmed parties in the corruption and fraud cases in which the criminal proceedings have been halted thanks to Klaus´s amnesty will lose any hope of compensation, but in fact few think that they really could get something from the fraudsters from the 1990s, Honzejk writes.

If the complainants are sincere about their proposal to charge Klaus with high treason, they should propose that the president´s possibility to halt criminal proceedings should be eliminated from the rpesidential powers, Honzejk writes.

Constitutional court chairman Pavel Rychetsky promised Milos Zeman in the presidential campaign already that he will help him find candidates for constitutional judges if he becomes president, which is precisely the role that he must not play, Jiri Leschtina writes elsewhere in Hospodarske noviny.

He writes that Zeman will be building the Constitutional Court practically from the start.

It would be surprising if the former Social Democrat prime minister (Zeman) and his former deputy (Rychetsky) resisted the temptation to bring in left-orientated judges, Leschtina writes.

If the left gains a majority in the Chamber of Deputies in the next general election, it can happen that Zeman will be capable of pushing through to the constitution perhaps the embedding of obligatory ashtrays in the public Czech Television, Leschtina writes with irony, hinting at Zeman´s passion for smoking.

With the left´s election triumph, the Constitutional Court could lose its role of the last safeguard that swept away even at the time of the opposition agreement the unconstitutional bill on a change to the election system to which Rychetsky largely contributed, Leschtina writes.

The opposition agreement of 1998 allowed Zeman´s minority government to rule with support of the Civic Democrats (ODS), then headed by Klaus, in exchange for a portion of influence.

He writes that if this happened, the way towards a semi-presidential system favourable to authoritarians would be open.

Author: ČTK
www.ctk.cz