President Petr Pavel signed the legislation that says judges can give prison sentences to anyone who "establishes, supports or promotes Nazi, communist, or other movements which demonstrably aim to suppress human rights and freedoms or incite racial, ethnic, national, religious or class-based hatred," per Euro News.
Some institutions in the Czech Republic have said that the move corrects the classifications of Nazism and communism. The Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes argued that there has been a “legal imbalance,” because Nazism was banned but communism was not.
The Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia (KSČM), however, said that the move was politically motivated to tamp down the far-left party. "This is yet another failed attempt to push KSČM outside the law and intimidate critics of the current regime," the political party said. It is not clear if the law applies to official communist-aligned parties.
The Czech Republic does not have any communist party seats in parliament currently, and during the 2021 election, the party was not able to win more than 5 percent of the vote, meaning for the first time since 1920, there were no communist delegates in the legislative body.
The country was formerly part of Czechoslovakia in the post-World War II Europe, and was under Soviet Russia's rule for a time.
