The Supreme Court has overturned a ruling against an official who granted Czechoslovak citizenship to Josefina Czerninová, a countess who left Czechoslovakia in 1945. The court ruled that the conclusion that the official had behaved negligently was in extreme contradiction with the factual findings of the case.
Czerninová had been deprived of her property by the Beneš Decrees, but in 1999, the authorities posthumously issued her a Czechoslovak citizenship certificate. This enabled her descendants to reclaim millions of square metres of forest and other real estate in southern and western Bohemia, including a castle in the Karlovy Vary region.
In 2013, Ivana Odarčenková, one of the officials who made the decision to issue Czerninová a citizenship certificate, was handed a one-day prison sentence, suspended for one year, for negligence and mishandling of the task of a public official. The Supreme Court objected to the criminal prosecution of officials simply for arriving at a legal opinion contrary to the one the prosecutors would have liked.