CZECH REPUBLIC | Fifteen women accused of backing nazis

Sources: ČTK and ceskapozice.cz Tuesday, 14 February 2012, 16:47

The Czech police have accused 15 women of supporting the Resistance Women Unit (RWU), a group considered a women´s branch of the Czech nazi movement, National Resistance, Pavel Hantak, spokesman for the police unit fighting organised crime (UOOZ), has told the media. The women, aged from 21 to 32, face up to eight years in prison for promoting and supporting a movement leading to suppression of human rights and freedoms, Hantak said. None of the suspects have been taken into custody. Most of the women are suspected of organising far-right events, producing and distributing leaflets and posting internet texts promoting the RWU.

Hantak said Czech detectives have pursued the case since September 2009 and that it is connected with a police raid in 2009 when 18 far-right supporters were charged. He said some of the radicals had ties to the so-called White Justice group. The case is being coordinated by the state prosecution service in the northern city of Děčín, an area of high racial tension where there were clashes with and demonstrations against the Roma minority in the summer of 2011.

Earlier this month, police arrested and charged Michaela Dupová, a member of the Workers’ Social Justice Party (Dělnická strana sociální spravedlnosti – DSSS) and a former leader of the RWU, for wearing tattoos of banned extremist symbols. She, too, now faces up to three years in prison for promoting and supporting a movement aimed at suppressing human rights and freedoms.

The RWU was created in 2007 and harks backs to similar organisations in Nazi Germany that stressed the purity of the so-called Aryan race, according to the police unit. Speeches at a May Day RWU rally in 2008 attacked immigrants and refugees, whom speakers claimed to be claiming social benefits; described the then government as a corrupt cesspit and berated multiculturalism and moves to liberalise drugs laws.