By Johann Georg Reissmüller
For a full year attorney Jiri Setina was the General Prosecutor in Prague between 1992 and 1993. He could not foresee the coup from the end of 1989, which could only end in failure. Setina’s experience as a former prosecutor with a state taboo.
From the year 1992-1993 attorney Setina was the General Prosecutor in Prague a short time. It could be predicted that everything that he touched from the change of regime from 1989 could not end well. These were his experiences with the taboos of the state.
First he worked in the new "Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Democracy," which was similar to the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution. While this was still going on, he built up an authority, which was like the German Gauck Institute that dug into the archives of the communist secret police with regard to specific individuals. Thus, Setina did not make friends. The new political authority gave him little support. They granted him only sixteen people; he was the only lawyer. His proposals on how to organize the administration were rejected. But he managed to get things done. Setina discovered files about an agent whom the Czechoslovakian secret service had embedded into the radio-free Europe radio station in Munich, and who had prepared an attack on their headquarters. The agent was arrested and tried in Prague. This could not help Setina because a lot of these communist agents from the communist era still sat in state institutions.
This became the next step in his eventual destruction. When Jiri Setina became Attorney General, he established a Coordination center for the documentation and investigation of crimes between the periods from May 8, 1945 to November 30, 1989. Why? Politically motivated crimes in Czechoslovakia before the communist upheaval before February 25, 1948? Already at the time the head of state was bourgeois Benes as president of Czechoslovakia with the bourgeois ruling party and Social Democrats together with the Communists who ruled Czechoslovakia? This was the state taboo of the Benes decrees which he then touched.
The General Prosecutor in Prague could challenge court rulings by appealing to the Supreme Court in the form of a complaint of a violation of the law. This happened in the case of entrepreneur Jan Antonín Bata who on May 2, 1947 was condemned in the National Court in a process that was clearly contrary to the rule of law to fifteen years in prison under Benes Decree number 16. Against Bata, the owner of the global industrial and commercial enterprise; he faced organized political baiting which was started in 1945. The communist leader Gottwald did not have to say a word because monsignor Hala, minister of the Catholic Oriented People’s Party had called Mr. Bata a criminal and collaborator. Collaboration with German occupying forces was never proved by the National Court in May of 1947, but the Communists found other reasons. The communists had achieved their goal; Bata’s huge assets fell into the hands of the state. Even with such measures Czechoslovakia was already bolshevized for a period of three years before Gottwald’s coup in February 1948.
1 - Francisco M. Arcanjo: The World Will Understand. The story of the King of Shoes, Jan Antonin Bata (Mark Belza, 2004, we filed a complaint for violation of the law s. 188-191)
Setina's attempt failed. In the year 1994, the Supreme Court found that the time in which Jan Antonin Bata was convicted had to be regarded as legally concluded and was not subject to the criteria of applicable law. It could only be amended only by a new law. The President of the Supreme Court in 1994 was the current Czech Minister of Justice. Today the Czech Minister of Justice (later ombudsman Otakar Motejl - Ed. M. B.).
Setina's legal complaint against the judgment from the year 1993 against Bata’s sentence in 1947 alarmed the political class in Prague. Would this Attorney General be against other political penalties from the time between the end of the war and the communist coup?It was Jan Antonin Bata who was convicted in on May 2, 1947 in the National Court in a process that was clearly contrary to the rule of law to fifteen years in prison under Benes Decree No. 16. So did Setina go against the Benes Decrees? For example, against those who had gone against the Germans in Czechoslovakia against oppression? Even against the law in on May 8, 1946 on the legality of acts connected with the struggle for the reunification of the Czechs and Slovaks which did not exclude the misdeeds against Germans including mass murders which happened at the end of the war, and tried to cover up? Did Setina try to show the peak of the unlawful state of the Benes and Gottwald regime? Yes, that’s exactly right. The instinct of the Prague political class was intact.
A storm rose against Setina. The Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party, and the Catholic-oriented People's Party - have all lobbied against him. They disavowed him and the big right-wing Liberal Party distanced itself from him. Newspapers attacked him, they demanded either his resignation or removal from office. President Havel publically asked him to step down from office. The complaint against him was proven unfounded. This was unusual behavior for the head of state.
In fact in late 1993, a prosecution was launched against Setina on legal grounds: that he violated state secrets, affronted the authority of state power, and endangered foreign exchange management. The Court of First Instance acquitted Setina on all points in the proceedings, which had dragged on for three years. Yet in May of 1997, Rude Pravo announced (the earlier communist central authority) that Setina was to go to trial which happened again. The second instance in its previous statement in the proceedings in which the defendant was not allowed to attend, nor was his lawyer. From January 1, 1998 two criminal lawsuits were canceled whose breach was attributed to the harm done to Setina. The third was changed so that no action would be taken against Setina, even though the criminal prosecution had not yet been canceled. At what stage today is what justice Czech Republic further has in store for Setina, only he himself knows? In 2000, the criminal justice was the opposite of what is was in the year 1994.
When Jiri Setina, a Czech, was sixteen year old at the end of 1948, his father was condemned by the communist criminal justice system for his attempted escape from the republic and his father was sentenced to five years in prison. While in custody he had to work in a kaolin factory. The kaolin dust destroyed his father’s lungs and he died in 1957. His son was allowed to study legal science and wanted to become a lawyer but had to work as a public prosecutor. There, he was one of the few without a communist party membership. But, the government never allowed him to be involved with political criminal proceedings.
The criminal prosecution against attorney Jiri Setina in the Czech Republic lasted 12 years from 1993 - 2005. On March 31, 2005, the Supreme Court judgment in Prague sp. zn. 2 To 84/2004, where attorney Setina was finally acquitted of all accusations. In their rationale, they explained none of his acts had been criminal. For a period of twelve years, attorney Setina was prevented from actively pursuing his career which was the goal of the government from the beginning. In his last appeal against the Supreme Court in Prague, attorney Setina wrote that the continuous twelve years of proceedings required ignorance and malice of Czech justice. That is why in 2004, attorney Setina filed a lawsuit against the Czech Republic in Strasbourg.
In 1966 he retired from the prosecutor's office citing the reason: he could not longer serve a justice system that handled the law in such a 
way. Thereupon they demanded the arrest of Setina. But under the party of Novotny, the regime had loosened its grip. This allowed Setina to become the Secretary of the Confederation of Painters, Graphic Artists and Visual Artists - the only non-party secretary of one of the cultural associations. In 1967 he participated in the organization of the first uncensored exhibition of paintings in the Soviet bloc, after it was debated in the Politburo. The second uncensored exhibition in 1969, a year after the Soviet invasion was closed by the secret police. Setina soon found himself on the street and continued to get by as a laborer. Today he is retired with his 410 Marks pension (about € 205) as a lawyer. He prefers to represent people who are disadvantaged for political reasons; often from them he does not require any fee. Jiri Setina lives in Prague and served as the Chief prosecutor who wanted to change the Benes - Gottwald regime.
Johann Georg Reissmüller
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, April 18, 2000, the Federal Republic of Germany
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Jan Šinágl, 16.11.2016
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