Council members
MUDr. Naděžda Kavalírová (born in 1923)
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After February 1948, Naděžda Kavalírová was excluded from all institutions of higher learning in the then Czechoslovak Republic for political reasons. She worked as a nurse, for which she had the needed qualifications as she had completed the Masaryk Higher School of Health and Social Care. In 1956 she was arrested and sentenced to five-year prison term in a fabricated trial. She was released from prison on parole in 1959. She then worked in manual professions for seven years and was trained to be a lathe operator. After the spring of 1968, Naděžda Kavalírová won a competition for a position at the newly formed Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs and went to work there in the autumn of 1968. She worked as a rank-and-file office worker in charge of social affairs until her retirement in 1984. Then she served as a temporary helper at the legal department of the State Pension Security Office (now the Czech Social Security Administration), and in the spring of 1991 went to work at the Compensations Department of the Czech Ministry of Justice where she worked until the end of 1994. Since 1990 she has been involved in the Confederation of Political Prisoners, first as its deputy chairwoman and later as its chairwoman (as of the year 2003). |
Mgr. Patrik Benda (born in 1974)
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Patrik Benda is a graduate of Prague‘s Charles University Faculty of Philosophy where he studied the Czech language and literature. From 1997 to 2003 he worked at the Office for the Documentation and Investigation of the Crimes of Communism (ÚDV), first as an editor and later as a documentarist. He prepared for publication two three-volume series of documents mapping the activity of Czechoslovak State Security (StB) at the close of the 1980s, and published the Survey of the Files and Records of the Internal Intelligence of the State Security Headquarters in 1989 (ÚDV, Prague 2003) as his independent work. He currently holds the position of an advisor to Senate Vice Chairman Jiří Liška. He is the son of dissident and politician Václav Benda. |
Čestmír Čejka (born in 1928)
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Čestmír Čejka is presidium member of the Czech Confederation of Political Prisoners. He was sentenced to imprisonment in connection with the trial of Milada Horáková in the 1950s and spent a total of twelve and a half years in communist prisons. After 1989 he was a deputy to Prague’s Mayor (1990-1991), and a deputy to the minister of state control of the Czecho-Slovak Federative Republic (1991-1992). He was also presidium member of the Fund of National Property. |
Prof. PhDr. Petr Fiala, Ph.D. (born in 1964)
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Petr Fiala is a political scientist and historian, the Rector of Brno‘s Masaryk University (as of the year 2004), professor of political sciences and head of the Institute for Comparative Political Research at the Masaryk University Faculty of Social Sciences.
During his university studies of history and the Czech language in Brno in 1983–1988, Petr Fiala joined students’ independent activities –he co-founded and edited samizdat university journal Revue 88. He later helped establish the field of political science at Masaryk University, and headed the Department of Political Science (1993–2002) and the Department of International Relations and European Studies (2002–2004). He was also the director of the Masaryk University International Institute of Political Studies (1996–2002), and the Dean of the Faculty of Social Studies (2004).
Petr Fiala specializes in comparative political science, European politics and research into the political dimension of religion. He is the author of 12 monographs and more than 150 specialized studies published in many countries. |
PhDr. Michal Stehlík, Ph.D. (born in 1976)
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Michal Stehlík is a graduate of Prague’s Charles University Faculty of Philosophy where he studied history and the Slovak language. From 1999 to 2001 he worked in the Municipal Museum and Gallery in Dačice (Southern Bohemia), and from 2001 to 2002 at the Czech Ministry of Culture, in the Section for the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage, Museums and Galleries. In 2002, Michal Stehlík went to work in the National Museum to be appointed its deputy general director for exhibitions and collections a year later. In 2006 he was appointed Dean of Charles University Faculty of Philosophy where he had been teaching as an external teacher at the Institute of Slavonic and East European Studies. Since 2006 he has been also teaching at Technical University in Liberec (Northern Bohemia). Michal Stehlík specializes in Czech-Slovak relations before 1918, in the history of the South-West Moravian and the Highlands regions, and in Czechoslovakia’s history of the 1950s. His major publications include the titles “Jews in the Dačice and Slavonice Regions 1670-1948 (Židé na Dačicku a Slavonicku 1670-1948) and “The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia against the Catholic Church. Dačice District 1948-1960“ (KSČ proti katolické církvi. Dačický okres 1948-1960). |
Jan Zahradníček (born in 1948)
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Jan Zahradníček was apprenticed to become a mechanic, and also completed studies at the Secondary Vocational Engineering School in Brno. He worked in various manual professions and later as a technician. In the first free general election in June 1990 he was elected Deputy to the Czech National Council, and defended his seat in the general election of 1992. He worked in the parliamentary Committee for Social Policy and Health Care until the expiry of his mandate in 1996. In the autumn of the same year he was elected Senator of the Senate of the Parliament of the Czech Republic. Jan Zahradníček was member of the Committee for Social Policy and Health Care, and at the same time vice chairman of the Mandate and Immunity Committee for the next six years.
He is the son of Czech poet and writer Jan Zahradníček who was persecuted for his conviction after 1948 and sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1952. His family also suffered from persecution and was forcefully moved from Brno. Jan Zahradníček devotes himself to the literary inheritance of his father, the 3rd Resistance, and the fates of political prisoners. |
Ing. Ivan Dejmal (1946 – 2008)
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After finishing elementary school, Ivan Dejmal was apprenticed to become a gardener, and in 1965 passed his GCE at a secondary gardening school. From 1965 to 1970 he studied at Prague’s Agricultural University, but he was expelled following his arrest for his activity in students’ movement. After spending four years in prison on charges of subversive activity against the Republic (1970–1972 and 1974–1976), Ivan Dejmal worked in various manual professions such as a co-driver, street cleaner, window cleaner, tombstone cutter, maintenance man, warehouse operator, or cooling and pumping equipment operator until the end of 1989. Between the years 1970 and 1990 he was involved in political work in the opposition and in the ecological movement. He stood at the birth of the Charter 77 movement in 1976 and soon became the head of its environmental commission. In 1987 he started to edit and issue his samizdat journal Ecological Bulletin (Ekologický bulletin). He co-founded the Movement for Civic Freedom (Hnutí za občanskou svobodu) in 1988, and also the first independent ecological organization, the Ecological Society, which initiated the foundation of the Green Circle association of ecological organizations in the autumn of 1989. Ivan Dejmal participated in the foundation of the Confederation of Political Prisoners in December 1989. He headed the ecological section of the Civic Forum programme commission from November 1989 till the 1990 general election.
In February 1990, Ivan Dejmal went to work at the Czech Ministry of the Environment. In the same year he was rehabilitated and finished his studies at Prague’s Agricultural University. He was appointed minister of the environment of the Czech Republic in February 1991 and held the post until July 1992. He headed the strategic studies section in the Czech Ecological Institute until 1994, and in 1993 founded the Countryside Renewal Society and headed it for the next three years. Ivan Dejmal was the director of the Czech Institute of Environmental Protection in 1994-1995, and he worked as an independent designer in the field of landscape and territorial planning as of 1995. He died after a short serious disease on 6 February 2008. |