European Interest

Amnesty International criticises Czech officials for xenophobia

Flickr/Roman Boed/CC BY 2.0
A view of the Czech capital Prague.

The international human rights group Amnesty International has claimed in its newly released report on the state of human rights in the world that Czech President Milos Zeman and other senior government officials made xenophobic statements about refugees and migrants last year.

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.”

As reported by The Prague Daily Monitor, the report does not mention the names of particular Czech representatives who were speaking about refugees in a xenophobic manner.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International criticised Poland’s refusal to accept the refugee quotas. The group also criticised 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.

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