Rudolf Vojtěch was introduced to the dissidents by his friend Miloslav Skalický, later convicted for organizing concerts of underground bands. “We met, we had the same opinion on the political situation in our country, and later we created a cell with František “Čuňas” Starek, which started to distribute samizdat publications,” Rudolf Vojtěch described to Novinkám.
Thanks to this activity, he repeatedly got to Hrádeček to see Václav Havel, where he also met other important figures of dissent, such as Jan Ruml or Jiří Dienstbier. “We dealt with politics and the music of banned bands,” recalls Vojtěch today. His cell in Chomutov gradually moved from the distribution of printed materials to their reproduction, and Vojtěch also distributed Charter 77 among his acquaintances.
In the early 1980s, however, he had to spend 25 months in a communist prison. The regime at the time wanted to get rid of him as an inconvenient person, and the repressive forces “stitched” on him the crime of speculation, i.e. illegal enrichment.
Five years after the Velvet Revolution, in 1994, the courts cleared Vojtěch and decided that he had not committed any criminal activity. It might seem that the injustice was redressed. But not completely. Vojtěch’s crime of speculation was one of the so-called general crimes that were not covered by the law on judicial rehabilitation.
Gradually, a paradoxical situation arose. The Ministry of Defense, for example, confirmed to Vojtěch that in the period from 1977 to 1979 he developed consistent and active anti-communist activity and included him among the participants of the third resistance. Nevertheless, he was not entitled to judicial rehabilitation. For example, he lost a supplement to his pension for illegal imprisonment.
In the end, Vojtěch was also helped by the case of singer and emigrant Jaroslav Hutka. “Both cases are similar. Jaroslav Hutka was once accused of rioting, but the Constitutional Court later recognized that such a classification of his act was only a pretext for his further persecution and that he was actually guilty of sedition. Hutka’s case reached the Constitutional Court precisely because rioting was not covered by the Law on Judicial Rehabilitation, while sedition was,” explained the similarity between Hutko and Vojtěch’s case, Lubomír Müller, legal representative of Rudolf Vojtěch.
Photo: Memory of the Nation / Archive of Rudolf Vojtěch
Rudolf Vojtěch in 1976
“Political crimes were disguised as criminal crimes and thanks to them, the opponents of the regime at the time were brought to court and imprisoned. In fact, this only covered up political resistance to the regime,” said judge Martin Roubalík on Monday when justifying the resolution, who also apologized to Vojtěch on behalf of the Chomutov court that convicted Vojtěch in 1980.
According to Lubomír Müller, there are still plenty of people in the Czech Republic who are unfairly not covered by the Judicial Rehabilitation Act, although they should be entitled to the benefits associated with it. “We are currently dealing with around fifty such cases. Most of them are cases that did not end in a conviction, so rehabilitation did not apply to these people by law, but they can be treated similarly to Mr. Vojtěch,” described the lawyer.
